Holding the flashlight with a trembling hand, he slowly removed his jacket and rolled up the right sleeve of his cotton shirt.
“Lord, protect me, if it be Thy will,” he whispered in prayer. “Please let me be worthy of Your grace.”
Then he offered his flesh and blood to the deader. But when those cracked gray lips brushed his arm, he grew frightened and drew back. The zombie was quick in his hunger, though, and its teeth closed on Ingram’s hand. It took the communion like a vile penitent.
The pain washed through like molten electricity, and he bit his own lip holding in a scream. He immediately pulled his arm free—the teeth had barely punctured his flesh, but already he could feel the poison seeping into his bloodstream.
The deader smacked and blubbered in its aborted feeding, its rotting tongue licking Ingram’s blood from its lips. It quivered with need, as foul as any hellspawn that had ever walked the Earth.
Ingram, a little woozy, picked up the stanchion with which Cyrus had shepherded the zombie to the vestry.
“Get thee behind me, Satan,” he said, swinging the base of the stanchion into the deader’s skull.
He looked at the bite mark just above his wrist. It bore the oval shape of an eye that seemed to peer deep into his soul. He gently rolled down his sleeve, donned his jacket, and climbed the stairs to his office to wait.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Rocky wished he’d stayed on the second floor and waited this thing out.
When he’d entered the courtyard, he’d run into a sergeant from another squad who demanded to know where his outfit was. Rocky explained that he’d been assigned to escort a researcher and a safety official to Atlanta, but the sergeant didn’t believe him.
“See this blood on my clothes?” Rocky said. “That’s from Sergeant Marcus Jackson, my squad leader.”
“What happened to him?”
“Got bit. I put him down.”
The sergeant looked dubious, as if Rocky might’ve fragged his superior in order to avoid some particularly nasty duty. “So who gave you these orders, then?”
“Col. Hayes.”
“Bullshit. The colonel doesn’t break the chain of command like that. He delegates.”
“Why don’t you go up and ask him yourself? HQ is up on the roof and he’s probably still there.”
“I’ll do that, Maldonado,” he said, reading the nametag sewn onto Rocky’s fatigue jacket. “In the meantime, you’re on burn duty.”
Rocky wasn’t sure what “burn duty” was until the sergeant pointed to a group of privates standing around a pile of corpses. One man splashed gasoline from a jerry can while others contributed scrap paper, hymnals, and fallen branches to the funeral pyre.
“No way,” Rocky said.
“Those things were infected. Unless you want that virus getting inside you and all the rest of us, it needs to be scorched down to nothing but a pool of black tar.”
“Some of those people weren’t deaders,” Rocky said. “They got caught in your crossfire when some grunt lost his shit.”
“Don’t go acting all innocent, boy,” the sergeant said, emphasizing the derogatory remark even though he was scarcely older than Rocky. “You’re part of this as long as you wear that uniform.”
Rocky was thinking he might need to remove this uniform the first chance he got. Even though it gave him some freedom of movement and permission to carry a weapon, he wasn’t sure he agreed to this kind of duty when he enlisted. He saw little honor in what these soldiers had done, engaging in an indiscriminate massacre because they feared for their lives.
But were they really to blame? Many of them were fresh recruits, and others were National Guard reserves who’d previously experienced nothing more dangerous than weekend campouts in the woods. There sure as hell wasn’t a zombie chapter in the field manual.
Instead of arguing with the sergeant, who apparently did have more combat experience than him, Rocky stood at attention, saluted, and marched briskly to the bonfire that was now roaring and crackling. He smelled it before he was within fifty feet of the flames—rancid barbecue made all the more cloying because of the sweetness that imbued the smoke.
“You met Sarge, huh?” a fuzz-faced teenager asked.
“Nice guy,” Rocky said. “Very inspiring.”
“Don’t breath that smoke,” said a diminutive but muscular woman with a ponytail bob protruding from the back of her fatigue cap. “Might get the deader disease.”
Rocky saw no need to share Meg’s theory that the virus was already inside them all. They were relaxed for probably the first time in days.
“I got something you can smoke,” one of the other soldiers said. He mimed puffing on a joint and laughed.
“Sprinkle some deader meat in that weed, and you’ll get crazy high,” said Fuzz Face. “Talk about the fucking munchies!”
“Yo, old man, help me with this one,” Toker Boy said to Rocky. He motioned to a body lying near a Humvee, its head completely missing.
Rocky looked around and saw the sergeant was still within view, enthusiastically chewing out another private. Rocky followed Toker Boy to the corpse.
“You take the hands and I get the feet,” Toker Boy said.
“Yeah, and I’m the one who gets to touch exposed flesh.”
“It’s cool. We’ve been doing this all morning, and you don’t see any of us getting sick, do you?”
“I heard plenty of soldiers turned last night during the shoot-’em-up.”
“Hell, yeah, man. My buddy Sutherland was right next to me when he suddenly starting shaking like somebody jabbed a live wire into him. Like a fucking Arab in a torture cell at Guantanamo. He’d been looking a little pale, but I thought it was just the stress, ya know?”
Rocky studied the grisly neck opening, wondering if the virus in the torn flesh had died along with its host or was even now mutating and seeking a new home. He almost wished he hadn’t met Dr. Meg Perriman, because now he imagined even worse things unfolding in the hours and days ahead. Toker Boy’s words came to Rocky and he remembered where he was.
“…and just like that, he threw down his weapon and turned on me. I would never have been able to kill him if it wasn’t for his eyes. His eyes were wrong, man. I shit you not.”
Rocky bent over the corpse and gripped the two wrists, half expecting the body to sit up and…what? It couldn’t bite him. But maybe the hunger hadn’t ended, and its fingers would try to rip away Rocky’s flesh and cram chunks of him down that exposed tube of torn gullet.
Then he noticed that the corpse’s flesh wasn’t mottled. “Hey, this one wasn’t a deader.”
“Who cares? Dead, deader, deadest. It’s all the same to this guy.”
“Our pile’s for the infected. The rest they’re trucking outside.”
“What’s the difference? We can carry him twenty yards and be rid of him, or we can drag this bastard the length of a Par Three golf hole and then have to lift it onto a truck bed. I say cut out the middleman and give the bad boy a slow roast.”
“And I say go to hell, you psycho,” Rocky said, dragging the corpse toward a truck near the entrance where crews loaded dead civilians. Toker Boy shrugged and returned to the bonfire, where he cracked a joke and mimed warming his hands over the flames even though the April temperature was already in the seventies. The wind picked up suddenly, and the brisk breeze fanned the flames, causing melted fat to crackle and pop.
Rocky had only gone a few dozen steps when he eased the corpse onto the pavement and returned to the Humvee. He looked underneath the vehicle and saw the decapitated head staring back at him from beneath the oil pan. Rocky dropped into push-up position and slithered forward until he could grab the head by the hair and drag it clear. He carried it to the corpse, nested the head in the crotch, and finished dragging his bundle to the pile of healthy dead.
Beyond the gates, squads of soldiers patrolled the streets. Some of them drove abandoned vehicles onto the sidewalk and out of the way, clearin
g the streets. Vehicles without keys were pushed to the side by several transport trucks sporting thick steel bumpers. Despite the signs of widespread destruction on the horizon, the immediate area looked relatively spared. Aside from broken windows, scrapped automobiles, and corpses, the city looked like it could go right back to business as usual. The wind increased, spraying grit against Rocky and kiting pieces of trash into the air.
As a couple of civilian volunteers took up the burden of the headless body, Rocky noticed the interloping sergeant was no longer in the courtyard. He beat a circuitous retreat back to the gym, noticing armed guards at the exterior portico that led to the main sanctuary. He breezed through the checkpoint without stopping, taking advantage of his uniform, and made it to the stairwell without being challenged.
A flashlight blinded him and he heard Grabowski’s voice. “Well, well, well, you made it through the night.”
“So did you,” Rocky said, squinting to see Grabowski and two others heading down the stairs. “Not that I’m surprised.”
“Can’t kill me,” Grabowski said. “I was born for this shit.”
“Let’s go,” one of the other soldiers said to Grabowski. “Our squad’s gathering for patrol.”
“You coming with us?” Grabowski asked Rocky. “Or did you find some kind of pussy-assed duty where you stand around a bunch of officers?”
“I’ve got orders from Col. Hayes. Bodyguard detail.” He didn’t feel like wasting time on the asshole, but he resented Grabowski’s implication that he was soft. “I need to check in.”
“Watch your step,” one of them said. “Might have one that went from deader to deadest up there.”
Rocky was eager to get back to Sonia and the others, so he didn’t want to risk getting caught up in another disposal detail. “Not my problem.”
“Ours, neither. Just letting you know so you don’t trip over it. There’s somebody with it. Big sister, I think.”
“I’ll watch my step.” He stood aside and as Grabowski and the other two passed, he added, “Good luck,” to which Grabowski replied with a grunt.
Still blinking away the afterglow of the flashlight beam, Rocky felt his way up the stairs. When he reached the second floor, he nudged his boot forward to make sure his footing was solid and there were no surprise steps.
“Ow,” a woman said as the tip of his steel-toed boot bumped into something soft.
“Sorry,” Rocky said. “Can’t see a thing.”
“Just don’t step on my sister. She’s lying right here.”
“Is she okay?”
“I think she’s dead.”
“Dead, or a deader?”
“Just plain dead,” the woman said.
Rocky bit back a sigh. He wanted to just brush on past and not get involved, but the woman sounded distraught and broken. “Anything I can do to help?”
“Just leave us alone, please.” The woman’s words now sounded muffled, as if she’d put her hands over her mouth. The stairwell was quiet aside from the muted sounds of the crowd on the first floor. Rocky thought he heard a low, moist rattling.
“Are you sure she’s just dead?” Rocky asked, easing his finger inside the trigger guard of his M16. His eyes had adjusted enough that could barely make out their forms, black shapes silhouetted against dark gray surroundings. The woman was hunched over the smaller figure of her sister, but the girl wasn’t lying limp and supine. Her legs twitched, scuffing her sneakers along the concrete floor.
“Yes,” the woman said, now nearly sobbing. “I promised her mother…I…”
“Wait, I thought she was your sister.”
Rocky moved forward, skirting the two people and giving them as much room as possible. He put his left hand on the door to the second floor, keeping his right hand in firing position. He wasn’t sure if the woman was trying to fool him into thinking the girl was dead or if she was so upset that she wasn’t aware that she had a fresh zombie in her arms.
Rocky opened the door to allow more light into the stairwell. The little girl certainly looked in bad shape, with a blood-streaked face and quivering limbs, but she showed no signs of the carnivorous hunger that marked the deaders.
“You might want to get away from her,” Rocky said to the woman, whom he now saw was a young adult. “I can…take care of it if necessary.”
“No,” the woman wailed. “I promised her mother. We came here to find her.”
“Bad things happened here. A lot of people didn’t make it.”
“She would’ve. She’s a doctor. She’s important.”
“A doctor? Did you check the medic tent?” Rocky knew they hadn’t, or the girl would have been quarantined and secretly exterminated. A job that he himself should now take on, if he held duty above personal morals.
“She’s not that kind of doctor. She researches viruses.”
“Dr. Perriman? Meg Perriman.”
At the mention of the name, the girl stirred and whispered, “Mom?”
“Do you know her?” the woman said, excited now, wiping at her tears.
“She’s here. At least, I think she is. I was assigned to go with her to the CDC. She wasn’t going to leave until she found her family.”
The woman started to explain how she’d ended up with Meg’s daughter, but Rocky interrupted her. “No need. She’s here on this floor.”
Together they lifted the girl from the landing—Rocky noted how much lighter she was than the headless corpse—and carried her into the hallway. Rocky kept a wary eye on the girl’s face, bracing for her to snarl and snap at any moment. He got a better look at the woman—leather jacket, blond bangs with brown streaks, high cheekbones, fierce green eyes—and realized her display of weeping had been an act. She looked like the kind who didn’t spray tears around at every little catastrophe.
Rocky heard groups talking inside some of the other meeting rooms and hoped no one saw them passing. One door had been kicked open and its handle was cantilevered and twisted. People were already breaking up into tribes and fending for themselves. He imagined much the same was happening across the city and the world, new social orders and new rules arising to meet the desperate times.
When he reached the door where he’d left the others, he knocked with the bottom of his fist and said, “It’s me. Rocky.”
After a moment, the door opened a couple of inches and Meg’s face appeared.
“I brought you something,” the blond woman said, a little guiltily.
Meg let out a cry of alternating relief and anguish, wrapping her daughter in a tight hug. Sonia and Jacob gathered around while Sydney and Arjun hung back, unsure of what to do.
“She’s worse,” Jacob said. He turned to the blond woman, upper lip curling in anger. “You were supposed to take care of her!”
The woman sagged in defeat, and this time it looked like she was going to cry for real. But Meg said, “It’s not your fault, Hannah. You kept her alive. Thank you.”
The little girl let out a pitiful and small cry. “Mommy.”
“Get inside.” Rocky was afraid someone would come outside to check on the commotion. He herded them into the room, Hannah last of all. A head poked out of the room with the busted door.
“All clear,” Rocky boomed in his most authoritative voice. “We’re sweeping the rest of the building now.”
He didn’t know whether the nosy snoop was intimidated or comforted, but the head ducked back inside without comment. Rocky entered and locked the door behind him. The others were gathered around the girl who now lay on the carpet, still trembling and sweating, her eyelids fluttering. The stuffed teddy bear in her arms was grimed with dried blood but its stitched smile showed not a care for the end of the world.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“She’s burning up,” Sonia said, pouring water from a plastic bottle onto a swatch of fabric torn from a curtain.
Meg cupped Ramona’s cheeks as Sonia dabbed at her daughter’s face. She felt so helpless. Despite all her knowledge of the tiny orga
nisms rapidly multiplying inside her daughter’s body, she couldn’t do a thing to stop it. The fever had reached the boiling point—if it didn’t break soon, Ramona would likely suffer brain damage.
If she lived.
Meg couldn’t even contemplate that horror. She was scarcely aware of the others around her until Hannah tapped her shoulder and said, “Here’s a first-aid kit.”
Meg shook her head. “I’ve already given her fever reducers. She needs strong antivirals, not a Band-Aid. And even those wouldn’t…”
Hannah was only trying to help. And no doubt she’d faced terrible ordeals in bringing Ramona to Promiseland. She could’ve easily abandoned the sick girl and gone off to save herself. Or not bothering to offer help in the first place.
“Is she going to die, Mom?” Jacob asked, kneeling beside his sister.
The lie came almost automatically to her lips, but maybe she needed to start preparing her son for the harsh days ahead. “I don’t know, honey.”
“Want me to look for a doctor?” Rocky asked, his voice husky with emotion. “Maybe I can even get a medic since I’m in uniform.”
“They don’t even know what we’re dealing with,” Meg said. “Hell, I probably understand as much as anybody, and I couldn’t even begin to come up with an answer.”
Ramona’s eyelids parted and the panic in them broke Meg’s heart all over again. Her little baby was scared. Whatever was happening to her, she’d ultimately have to face it alone.
Her breath grew shallow and raspy, the tremors easing. At first Meg thought she was drifting into unconsciousness, but then Ramona gave a gasp and a final shudder, and a long, anguished exhalation carried her final breath against Meg’s face. It cooled a tear rolling down her cheek.
“No,” Meg whispered, too broken and exhausted to wail. “Not my baby.”
Jacob fell onto his sister, sobbing, imploring her to wake up. Sonia continued wiping the girl’s face, almost robotic in her focus. The others hovered around, keeping a respectful distance from the mourning family. Outside, the wind howled around the building like a mournful lament.
Arize (Book 1): Resurrection Page 22