Arize (Book 1): Resurrection

by Nicholson, Scott

  Gunfire popped and clattered in the distance, which Hannah took as a sign that the military had expanded its territory and pushed back the infected hordes. “Hear that?” Hannah said to Ramona. “That means we’re safe here.”

  A private with strained features saw them walking across the pavement and flagged them to a stop.

  “No civilians outside without permission,” he said.

  “We got caught out during the zombie attack last night,” Hannah said. “We’ve been hiding since then.”

  “You got lucky. A lot of people didn’t make it.”

  “So it seems.”

  The soldier appraised Ramona with a squint. “You hurt?”

  She nodded. “I bumped my head.”

  “You can’t use our medics. That’s for essential personnel only. You’ll have to find a doctor or nurse inside if you can.”

  “Fine,” Hannah said. “Is there any food?”

  “You’re in luck. Not as many mouths to feed today, so we’ll have extra. Check with FEMA inside those doors there.”

  As Hannah started to hurry away, the soldier hailed her again. “You can’t have a firearm in here. Where did you get that?”

  Hannah waved toward a landscaped area at the far end of the parking lot. “Over there in the bushes. I thought I’d need it.”

  “You’ll have to surrender it.”

  Other soldiers and workers passed by, paying them no attention. For all the activity, there didn’t appear to be much order and no one seemed to be in charge. But Hannah didn’t want to risk causing trouble and having Ramona scrutinized. She removed the shotgun with feigned awkwardness and said, “I don’t know how to use it anyway.”

  The soldier’s stern features softened just a little, and Hannah saw that he was just a kid, barely older than she was. He was probably scared shitless. “If you stick around awhile, we might be offering instruction,” he said. “Who knows how long this is going to last?”

  The soldier’s words caused Hannah to reflect on the future. She’d been so busy surviving from moment to moment, her decisions made on impulse, that she’d not contemplated what the days and weeks ahead would look like, much less the years. And she realized all the survivors were in the same boat, even the authority figures.

  They were making it up as they went along.

  Breath by breath.

  But at least they were breathing.

  As Hannah gave the soldier the shotgun, she pointed to the open double doors where most of the noise came from. Two men emerged carrying a dead body toward a pile of corpses on the pavement. “We go in there?”

  “Yeah. Don’t worry; we’ve cleaned out the deaders. You’re safe now. It just doesn’t smell so good.”

  The inside of the gym was just as bustling and chaotic as the exterior grounds of Promiseland. A few people were mopping up blood, while others dragged or carried bodies outside. The soldier was right—a corrupt, unhealthy odor hung in the air, and the bleachers were pocked and scarred by bullets. One of the fiberglass basketball backboards had shattered, and the rim hung naked from its support post. On the wall behind the bleachers, a large wooden cross with a stylized background featuring a sunrise was spattered with brownish red spots.

  A man in an orange safety vest motioned them toward a group comprised of FEMA officials, a policewoman, and someone in medical scrubs. A series of tables served as a barrier funneling any newcomers to the checkpoint. Ramona eagerly looked around for her family, but with so many people in motion, it was difficult to pick anyone out of the crowd. As the two of them underwent interrogation at the checkpoint, Hannah played the role of bewildered big sister to a scared kid.

  The medic dabbed at Ramona’s face with a damp, dirty towel, and Hannah feared someone would check the girl’s temperature. But the medic appeared reluctant to touch the girl and muttered, “Restrooms are down that hallway. You can get cleaned up there. If you need treatment, there are some civilian volunteers at the far end of the first floor.”

  The other authority figures didn’t give them a thorough screening, which Hannah took as a sign of their exhaustion. She was afraid they’d confiscate the radio from her backpack, and maybe some of her food and personal supplies. What threat were two people with a hundred dead zombies piled up outside and probably thousands more walking the city?

  A line of people in rumpled, unkempt clothes waited outside the restrooms, and the smell was already unbearable. Hannah wondered if the plumbing had backed up. The lights were out in the hallway and only the natural light seeping through the doorways provided illumination. Maybe the entire grid was down now—if the city lost power, its plumbing and water systems would be on the blink as well.

  Although Ramona said she had to pee, Hannah wanted to get deeper inside the building. Maybe they could find a more private area where Hannah could concoct a better disguise for Ramona’s illness. They passed through a second entrance and found a group of bleary-eyed people sitting on the carpeted floor and blocking the hallway. They looked like war refugees who had been bombed out of their homes and still hadn’t shaken the shell shock.

  “Can we get through?” Hannah asked.

  “The Reverend’s not letting anyone in,” said a crinkly-haired old woman who hugged a plastic shopping bag to her chest.

  “She wants down the hall,” said a man lying on his back with his eyes closed.

  “Well, it’s a free country,” said the shrill woman. “Do what you want.”

  Hannah and Ramona passed by the large wooden doors that the others had clustered around. She hadn’t noticed it in the dimness. Judging by the ornate carving and the stained glass features above the arch, she figured it was the access to the sanctuary—the heart of Promiseland.

  They stepped carefully through the crowd and came to the stairwell, which was darker than the hallway. Even in the poor light Hannah could see large damp splotches that had to be blood. As they ascended, they heard more voices above.

  “Where do you think your mother would go if she was in here?” Hannah asked.

  “She’d be trying to find me,” Ramona said.

  “And where would she think you’d be?”

  “Probably away from everybody else. I don’t like lots of people.”

  “Don’t blame you, honey. We’ll try one floor at a time and then work our way back down. It seems easier to find people up here than down in the gym.”

  The second floor looked abandoned, which Hannah thought strange given the number of people waiting downstairs. Then she realized the most people were probably waiting to enter the church sanctuary, and that all the food, health care, and supplies were on the first floor. Instead of seeking security inside the building, the survivors sought the comfort of faith and government.

  That was fine with Hannah. Fewer unwashed people to smell.

  “Maybe we should try the third floor,” Hannah said. “Unless you’re too tired.”

  “I’ll try, but I don’t feel so good.”

  “Me, either, honey.” Hannah checked Ramona’s forehead again and found the fever had cranked up another notch. Sweat dotted the girl’s face, turning the dried blood and gore into a slick and sticky mess that threatened to slide down her cheeks.

  Several men were coming down the stairs toward them, talking loudly. A flashlight beam swept around the corner and along the wall.

  “Quick, lay down and act like you’re asleep,” Hannah said.

  Ramona collapsed against her, and Hannah caught her before she tumbled down the stairs. She eased down onto the second-floor landing in a sitting position, holding Ramona in her arms. The girl’s limbs quivered and trembled as if she were having a seizure.

  Oh, damn, she’s going to turn.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The sun hung glum and ochre over the smoking ruins that lay in all directions from the Promiseland roof, the wind pushing a veil of haze across it.

  To the west, a jet glinted like a silver needle against the sky, but Cameron Ingram knew it was a
military aircraft, not a commercial flight. He didn’t know if Sarah Beth had left the airport after landing the night before, or if she was barricaded in the terminal. She might even now be on her way to Promiseland, but Ingram had a difficult time imagining her catching a cab in this chaos. The aerial bombing might’ve slowed the spread of the zombie infestation, but it had devastated the electrical and telecommunications networks.

  Whatever the cost, Col. Hayes seemed pleased with a job well done. He signed off on his two-way radio and gave a terse grin. “We’ve now cleared a ten-block radius and we’re expanding our turf by the hour, Reverend Ingram. We’ve taken control of the capitol district and by tomorrow we should link up with the Twenty-Seventh Division coming south from Durham. Scout teams are nearly to the Beltway and we should have a route cleared to the Interstate by evening.”

  “What about the people?” the reverend asked. “The ones who haven’t turned?”

  “Some are out and about already. Squads are collecting them into groups for transport to the shelter here. We’ve got two other shelters in the outskirts that weren’t bombed out. Some of the sick have been quarantined into various buildings and put under armed guard. There’s plenty of looting, but we have authority to requisition any supplies we need to keep civilians fed and sheltered.”

  “And those who refuse to leave their homes?”

  “We don’t have a protocol for that yet. As long as they’re not interfering with our work, we’re leaving them alone. Let them take their chances. We’ll only kill them if we have to.”

  “And how will you know when that time comes?”

  Col. Hayes tried to smile but the expression came off like the rictus smirk of a skeleton. “When they try to eat us.”

  The Promiseland roof looked more like a fortress than a house of worship, despite the forty-foot-high cross and stained-glass steeple at the center of it all. Machine guns were posted at each corner, and soldiers stood watch along the length of every parapet. Since the troops had taken the battle beyond the walls, the compound was largely calmer, although occasional shots rang out as more zombies were discovered.

  Since the debacle with the helicopter, the shelter had remained more or less isolated from the outside world. A depleted advance squad from the Twenty-Seventh had arrived just before dawn in a banged-up Humvee, describing a harrowing journey through clogged highways and crowded streets. If not for four-wheel drive and a high-powered engine, the vehicle wouldn’t have been able to skirt the massive traffic jams that resulted from the sudden exodus.

  The Army’s plan was to use the combat heavies at Fort Bragg to conduct lane-clearing ops, opening up routes between the region’s military bases in Cherry Point, Jacksonville, and Goldsboro. The president had summoned all reserves to active duty, and even though most units were nowhere near full strength, enough command structure existed to carve out pockets of safe ground. The main problem, as Col. Hayes surmised, was the fight would ultimately come down to street-to-street and house-to-house combat—a war which might never end.

  “Like Vietnam,” Hayes said. “We bombed the hell out of the jungle for a whole decade, but you’ll never burn down every single grass hut. There won’t be any ‘Peace With Honor’ this time around, either.”

  “This is a different kind of war, Colonel,” Ingram said. “The enemy can summon an endless supply of new recruits.”

  “We’ll work on that as some as we get some breathing room. Last I heard, the CDC, the NIH, and Walter Reed were making this top priority, but since we can’t make contact, who knows if they’ve made any progress? And the president’s executive order brings the private sector into the fold, too, so we’ve got hundreds of eggheads crunching numbers and dialing down their microscopes.”

  Cyrus Woodley, who’d clung steadfastly to Ingram’s side since the outbreak began, voiced a rare observation. “We know people become deaders if they get bitten by other deaders, but some of them turn just by getting sick. How do you stop that?”

  “Like I said,” Hayes said, without conviction. “Science. Our job is just to hold down the fort until we can scrape together an infrastructure to deal with this thing.

  “We each have our mission,” Ingram said. “I gave you a free hand on military action, but I see a larger battle here. Until we see the Lord’s plan for us, we need to protect His holy ground. We’ve already been invaded by Satan’s armies because we willingly threw open our doors to all who wanted inside.”

  Hayes turned away in anger for a moment, gazing in the direction of a renewed burst of automatic gunfire in the distance. It reverberated up from the concrete canyons in the distance, where the innocent and guilty died cheek to cheek.

  “We screened for sickness,” Hayes finally said. “You heard that doctor. She said we’re all carriers, and some are more susceptible than others. We have no way of knowing who might turn.”

  Ingram peered over the parapet at the piles of corpses in the parking lot. “We have no idea how many of these people were among the elected. They came here in faith, and your men and women blindly opened fire.”

  “You can’t blame us for that. What did you want us to do, let the outbreak run wild? You’d have zombies up your asshole right now.”

  “No need for that language, Colonel,” Ingram said. “This is still the House of the Lord, even with all these guns and all this blood.”

  “I lost soldiers, too,” the colonel said, regaining his composure. “Nothing scarier than a zombie in uniform. The bottom line is that we need to keep an eye on each other, for better or worse.”

  “Because sometimes you can’t see the demon inside,” Ingram said. “We need a way to tell the good from the evil.”

  Hayes gave a quizzical squint, and then his radio hissed and squawked. The colonel excused himself to field the call, joined by his adjutants. Ingram returned to his fifth-floor office with Cyrus. Now that the control room was all but useless, Hayes and his security team had largely abandoned it, but the cameras and recording equipment maintained enough back-up battery power for Ingram to have a message ready when the time was right.

  “I have some mission work for you if you’re willing,” Ingram said to Cyrus.

  “I am ready to serve,” Cyrus said. “Just like always.”

  Ingram had met Cyrus when the man was a drug-addicted mixed martial arts competitor with a broken arm. Their encounter was one of serendipity, but Ingram later saw the Lord’s hand at work. Ingram made it a habit to frequent the neighborhood around Promiseland, adopting Jesus’s example of moving among the poor and the lost. Cyrus had stepped from an alley and asked Ingram for money, using his size to intimidate the smaller and older man. When Ingram demurred, more as a way to engage the rough-looking addict than to cling to money, Cyrus had threatened to “break his face and pluck out his gold teeth.”

  Undaunted, Ingram asked why the Lord had forsaken him so that he’d had to turn to the devil. Confused, Cyrus said the devil was the only who gave a damn. Ingram took the man to breakfast and an hour later, the big sobbing hulk had asked Jesus into his heart and pledged a life of service. That service evolved over the years as Ingram’s prominence grew, and sometimes the duty entailed acts that only God could forgive. Through it all, Ingram assured him that a higher good was served even if individual acts might appear evil at first blush.

  “There’s a tattoo shop three blocks over, on Rhine Road. It’s called Inkdom Inc. The one with the drawings of dragons and roses in the window.”

  “I know the owner. Big Jones. He used to be my dealer. Well, one of them. He lives in a little walk-up apartment above the shop.”

  “See if Big Jones or one of his associates is still alive, and bring him to me. Along with his toolkit.”

  “What if he doesn’t want to come?”

  Ingram nodded at the slight bulge of the holster beneath the armpit of Cyrus’s jacket. “Make him want to.”

  “What if the guards at the gate won’t let me out?”

  “You are under the dir
ect orders of the head of the president’s Outbreak Response Task Force. Anyone who interferes with our work is subject to immediate imprisonment. Tell them we need to be ready when the next wave of evacuees comes in.”

  “Yes, sir. You can count on me.”

  Ingram nodded and smiled. “I know.”

  After the bodyguard was gone, Ingram collected a flashlight and returned to his private stairwell leading down to the sanctuary. When he reached the narrow foyer behind the pulpit, he could hear the people inside singing and praying. A warm glow settled over him. Even in suffering, the faithful didn’t turn away from the Lord.

  He entered the vestry where he and Cyrus had earlier tied up the infected woman. In the darkened room, her wet sighs and low growls were those of an animal, a wild beast let loose from the deepest bowels of hell. Ingram switched on the flashlight and played the beam over the woman’s face. She twisted and writhed against the chair, clacking her teeth together as her neck strained forward. A drool of corrupted saliva ran down her mottled gray chin.

  “Deader,” he whispered, employing the secular slang for the demons. He alone seemed to see these creatures for what they really were.

  He wondered if he could heal her. He harbored just enough doubt that he didn’t want Cyrus or anyone else to witness his attempt. But now he felt that healing alone wasn’t enough. That was a half measure, one for the faint of heart.

  A truer test of faith would be to resist Satan’s power. And Ingram could only know that through fully embracing Satan.

  By letting the devil inside him.

  All the way.

  The charismatic Pentecostal preachers would handle venomous snakes to prove their faith. Some survived multiple bites, and some died the first time the poison reached their heart. Was Ingram’s heart strong enough?