by John Shirley
“Jill can sign too,” Becky revealed.
“I know she can. So can Ada.”
“And she told me we’re going to Washington, D.C.! The real one!”
“Right, not one of those pretend towns that Umbrella made. The real one.”
“I sometimes think I can remember being outside— but Jill says I wasn’t even alive before a few days ago.”
“You were alive, but you were sleeping in a lab. Like those others we saw. They put some memories in your mind, so you wouldn’t be confused when you woke up. But they aren’t real memories. You’re making real ones now.”
Becky nodded gravely.
“I’ll never forget any of this,” she signed. “Never. I want to see Washington, D.C. Our nation’s capital.”
“It’s not like it used to be,” Alice warned. “The Undead have overrun a lot of it, for now. But someday we’ll get rid of them, take it all back, and build it up again. A lot of it was burned down, you know, by the British, in the War of 1812. Centuries ago. They rebuilt it. It can be our nation’s capital again.”
“It’s not now?”
“Maybe in some ways. But the nation’s lost a lot of… organization.” She hoped she’d signed ‘organization’ right. “We’ll fix it. But it’ll involve having to fight a lot, I think. I don’t want to go there now unless I have to… but someday people like us will rebuild it.”
Alice hoped she wasn’t leading Becky into false hope. It occurred to her that before the second Fall of Man—before the rise of the Undead—there’d been new prototypes of artificial hearing devices, implants, transplants, various devices that were purported to treat deafness. Becky might’ve had her deafness effectively cured. And she could have become “a helicopter pilot” someday, in that world.
If she could get her hearing back, now, somehow, it would increase her chances of survival. If you can hear an Undead coming up from behind, you have a better chance of escaping.
But that world was gone now. People who weren’t killed by the Undead often died anyway, for lack of medical attention when they got an infected cut. Hearing implants? Not likely.
Still—what about Wesker, and whoever he was working with? They might have a cure for Becky, somewhere in their labs. But then, their “cure” might be a horror, too.
The black medic came in, then.
“We’re going down for refueling.”
“Where?” Alice asked.
“There’s an old Air Force fuel dump we’ve taken over, in the Sierras. Razor wire all around it—should be fairly safe.”
Who are you talking about when you say “we,” Alice wondered. But before she could ask, the medic busied himself hustling Becky to the opposite bulkhead, where he buckled her into a fold-down seat.
“You just take it easy right there, little lady,” he said. She didn’t understand his words but she smiled at him. He tousled her hair and took his own fold-down seat as the helicopter began to angle downward, coming in for a landing.
Becky looked happily around, and Alice swore to herself she’d see that the girl was taken care of. In time she’d have to teach her certain things—like how to use weapons, martial arts techniques. Probably start with judo. Work her way up, teaching her how to kill with her hands alone.
There was room for hope in the world, sure. But innocence? There was no room for innocence. As far as Alice could tell, innocence was dead. Umbrella had killed it.
The chopper’s engine changed its tune, whining, and then, after the slight jarring of setting down, the rotors slowed, their song getting lower in pitch.
Now was her chance…
Alice had made up her mind that she didn’t want to go to Washington. That would take them to Wesker—and that, alone, was enough reason to get away from the helicopter.
Albert Wesker, after all, had once tried to eat her alive. To literally eat her. He had transformed himself with the empowering variant of the T-virus, becoming a transfigurable superhuman. Sometimes he was just a pale man with slicked-back brown hair, shades, a long, black-leather coat, and black gloves. But when he chose, he could transform—his enormous mandibles extruding from between elastic jaws, his body swelling, muscles bulging.
Wesker didn’t have complete control over his transformations, so he’d decided that consuming “Project Alice,” as he called her, would allow him to absorb some key part of her DNA. Alice had told him that she wasn’t “on the menu”—and she’d escaped.
Just barely.
His mind was the most monstrous thing about him—his intricate rationalization for wanting absolute power. But it came down to something simple: The only thing that controls power, he said, is more power.
Wesker had been chairman of Umbrella when the T-virus project had been approved. Alice couldn’t prove it, but she suspected that Wesker might have manipulated Spence into releasing the virus. And now they were taking her to that monster.
Her and Becky?
No.
The medic got up, checked on her, patted her shoulder, and asked her if she needed anything.
“Maybe something nutritious to drink?” she replied. “Have anything like that? One of those canned smoothies or something?”
“We do. It’s about a year past its ‘use-by’ date but so is everything we got. I’ll get it for you.”
He went forward, and Alice unstrapped herself, ignoring the pain as she sat up. Becky unstrapped herself and came over.
“Listen,” Alice signed, “maybe we should go our own way—just you and me, from here. I don’t know much about these people. Would you trust me, to just go with me? You don’t have to.”
Fear flickered in Becky’s eyes. Her mouth trembled.
“Don’t leave me,” she signed.
“I won’t—I’m saying that you can go with me.”
“Will they let us go?” Becky asked.
An astute question…
25
Watching a tern fly away, past the circling cloud of gulls and out to sea, Jack Tannager ached to leave the island.
But he wasn’t sure he ever would. Uncle Chung claimed that wherever you were, it was enough. The world, he said, is small in the cosmos. Everything is a speck, ultimately, so why not live on a small island? The whole Earth was a small island in the infinite reaches of space, after all.
Yet here he was, standing on the stony beach at sunset, on the west side of Catalina Island, gazing out to sea, and every fiber of his being ached for exploration. There were, at least, other islands that might be clear of the Undead. At least they could be explored.
Uncle Chung wouldn’t hear of it.
“The sickness that killed your mother and father— it will not have you, too. I loved my sister very much. When it took her, changed the vessel that had held her soul, dishonored her memory, I swore I would give it no chance to harm you, Jack. We have been safe here for a long time. We will not take the chance…”
And there was Bim to talk to, and Lony. Sure, they were a young gay couple, so he couldn’t relate to them on every level, but they were nice guys. They liked to fish, and Lony had shown him how to handle a boat and how to surf.
Jack picked up a smooth disklike pebble, and tried to skip it between the rollers, but it struck a wave and sank.
Just like me, he thought, sighing. Can’t move on.
“Jack!” Uncle Chung called from the little bluff over the beach.
Jack turned resignedly to the sound.
“Yes, Uncle?”
“Come on, it’s getting dark, time for dinner… We must stand our watches, right after.”
He nodded glumly and climbed the sandy path that wound up the face of the bluff, joining his uncle. The old man stood in a fringe of sawgrass, hands on his hips. His orange Buddhist robe was frayed, his sandals were falling apart, duct-taped together. His scraggly gray beard was blowing in the wind. He smiled at Jack—that half-toothless smile, piquantly vulnerable. It was impossible stay angry with Chung for long. Especially since his eyes were so
like Jack’s mother’s: brown, almost black, gracefully epicanthic, penetrating.
Uncle Chung was the only family he had left.
Jack was half Chinese, though he spoke almost none of the Mandarin with which his mother and Uncle Chung used to chatter. His father had been a British airline pilot, and a good man, though Jack hadn’t seen enough of him. An infected passenger had killed him—and the plane had crashed.
After they had eaten, he and Uncle Chung stood watch companionably, Uncle Chung carrying the old M1 rifle strapped over his shoulder. It would have looked strange to see a Buddhist monk with a rifle, before the rise of the Undead. Now, of course…
They were lucky to have rifles enough, and a good supply of ammunition. Lony’s father had been a gun collector. He’d gone to Los Angeles just before the apocalypse, and was presumed dead. He’d been a fancier of World War II carbines, and he had laid in a sizeable supply of .30 caliber ammo in an old World War II bunker—designed to be prepared for a Japanese invasion that had never come. There were four M1 Garands, two German Lugers, a crate of ammo, and a “trench broom” shotgun. There was also a machine gun, but it didn’t work. The Thompson, too—no ammo for that.
But there was plenty of ammunition for the M1. They’d all been checked out, and had gotten damned good at target practice. And they’d cleaned the island of Undead, quite a while before. Jack had shot his share of zombies. The first time he got a good clean headshot, he said, “I killed one!” and was rewarded by a deep frown from Uncle Chung.
“Do not say you killed one,” Uncle Chung said. “I would not let you kill anyone. That thing is not alive. It is just a body, an inflamed nervous system, and a hunger. It is nothing more. You have ended the misery of an Undead, but it was killed when it transformed.”
There had been a lot more people here, of course, the day that the outbreak had started. There’d been almost four thousand people. More than half of them panicked and crowded on two large ferries, to escape the Undead.
The ferries had gone west, headed to another nearby island. Jack had watched them from the top of Mount Orizaba, the highest point on Santa Catalina Island, where he’d fled with Uncle Chung, after his mother had turned… into one of those things.
After his Uncle, weeping, had shot her in the head.
He hadn’t shot her, Jack reminded himself, whenever he thought of it. Just her body, animated. Her spirit was with the Buddha.
They’d watched the ferries head west, and then one of them appeared to veer wildly, to crash into the other. Soon both ferries sank. No one made it back to shore. Except a few they’d had to shoot.
A great many more of the folks had crowded into a gymnasium, to barricade themselves in, but one of them already had been bitten. The doors were locked when he began to spread the disease. The others, outside, had burned the gymnasium down, with all those people in it. Probably some of them hadn’t been Undead.
That wasn’t something Jack liked to contemplate.
They’d gone over the island with a fine-toothed comb, the few who’d survived. Thirty of them. And they’d killed Undead after Undead. Two of the hunters had been bitten—and become the hunted.
One day a boat drifted toward the island—and they could see Undead stalking back and forth on the deck. Three of the men, volunteers, went out in a motor yacht, shot the Undead on the deck from about thirty feet away, then towed the boat back out to sea and set it afire. They didn’t look to see what might be below decks.
That infected boat had spooked the survivors, and most had chosen to go on a cabin cruiser, to the west, hoping to find a safer place, more remote. Jack and Uncle Chung and Lony and Bim were all that remained on the island, apart from a few wild animals, and the half-feral dogs that Bim had almost tamed.
Bim was a stocky half-Polynesian man with a considerable belly and a big toothy smile. He came strolling up to them as they got back to the bunker on the north side of the island. Uncle Chung was breathing hard from the climb.
“See anything interesting over there, Jack?” he asked, waving. Bim was about thirty, and usually wore a Hawaiian flower shirt, white duck trousers, and sandals. Neither he nor Lony seemed effeminate to Jack.
The bunker was on a beetling foothill of the island’s small mountain, overlooking the small, sprawling estate house that Bim’s father had kept.
“No, nothing as usual,” Jack said.
“Anything float up—debris, something we could use?”
“Couple of fishing floats.”
“Wowie-zow,” Bim said, grinning. He liked to say “wowie-zow.” He liked to smoke pot, too—he and Lony had a little “weed patch,” as they called it, up on the hillside. Uncle Chung never touched it. And Jack pretended not to.
“The boy is getting bored,” Chung said. “Hard for him here. Maybe we should go on a fishing expedition, next nice day. There’s fuel in a lot of those boats still.” But as he said it he was frowning, staring out to sea. He seemed to be looking for something.
“What you see, Chung?” Bim asked, shading his hand to look.
The sun had mostly set—there was just a little twilight, and the rising moon’s glow.
“I… nothing. Don’t see anything. And I see everything—the waves. Everything is waves. But no ships. I just felt it was coming. And last night, I had a dream. Last night it was…”
“Last night?” Jack prompted. His uncle had precognitive dreams at times. And they always came true. He didn’t mention his dreams unless he felt they were important.
Chung shrugged.
“Been looking all day. Seeing nothing. Perhaps not as soon as I thought.”
“What was the dream?” Jack asked.
“Last night… I dreamt a submarine would come to the island.”
Alice simply walked out of the helicopter, into the cool early evening, with Becky holding her hand. There was a ring of light around the chopper. A guard stared at her, frowning—he had a blond beard, and bushy hair caught up in a headband. Probably he wasn’t sure what to do with her.
Alice looked at his gun, lusting after it. It was an M60, and would fire 7.62 x 51 mm cartridges at a rate of more than five hundred rounds per minute. The guy also had a sling with a lot of magazines stuck in it, all of them loaded.
She was weaponless right now, and she knew that gun well. If she could get hold of it, she could hold off a small army with that thing.
But she just smiled at him charmingly. She’d cleaned herself up before coming out, and looked as good as possible with all the bandages. She acted as if she was just getting the air.
The guard seemed to relax a little.
Out beyond the circle of light was a weedy field, and two fences, one inside the other. The inner fence, about twenty yards off, was topped by razor wire. The outer seemed to be electric—but she doubted that was working.
The light came mostly from lanterns—set up on fuel barrels nearby, at the edge of the tarmac—and from the helicopter’s windows.
They seemed to be on a slanted meadow, somewhere on a mountainside. There was an outbuilding and several tanks, presumably filled with helicopter fuel. There were pipes connecting them, and a flexible fuel line running to the back of the helicopter. Other choppers were circling, overhead, waiting their turn.
“I see trees,” Becky signed. “And the moon. I smell… I don’t know what it is. A bad smell and a good smell.”
“The bad smell is fuel,” Alice said, though she kind of liked that smell. “The good smell is probably a forest, somewhere around this fueling depot.”
“Not so cold here. That’s nice. Is that the real moon?”
“Yes.”
So far as Alice had been able to find out, they were on the east side of the Sierras, not terribly far from what had been the border with Nevada. Maybe this area would be relatively free of…
Then she saw them. The Undead.
They were shuffling toward the fences, growling. And there were hundreds of them.
She’d never get
past them, unless she fought her way through. Impossible without a major weapon— and with Becky to worry about.
“Aren’t we out in the boonies?” Alice asked the guard. “Why all the Undead?”
“Those all belonged to a military base, when they were people,” he said, shading his eyes to squint past the lights. “It’s about a mile from here. They see the lights when we come. Every time, they push the fences a little more. One of these days they’re going to… whoa. I think we’ve got a breach on the outer fence. Sarge!”
“Mama?” Becky quavered. “Are they going to come in here?”
“There are fences still in the way,” Alice signed. “If they get in, we have lots of protection.” But she still pulled the girl close.
“Ferguson!” the sergeant shouted through a door behind them. “We’ve got twelve minutes till we’re done here! Keep the damn peace out there! If you need back up, sing out!”
“Yes, sir!” Ferguson, the guard with the headband and the enviable M60, stalked off toward the fence.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Alice called. “Ferguson? Don’t get too close!”
He ignored her.
“Where’s he going, Mama?” Becky signed.
“Damned if I know,” Alice muttered. But signing, she said, “To check that the fences are safe.”
“Back off, you buzzard meat!” Ferguson yelled, approaching the barrier. Alice was betting that he hadn’t had much experience with the zombies, or he’d know that it wasn’t going to work.
She sighed. Plainly she wasn’t going to get away from these people—not here. She’d have to wait— maybe till Washington. Her first priority was survival, for her and Becky. So she turned and smiled down at the girl, cupping her chin in one hand.
“Go on in,” she signed with the other hand. “Get Jill for me. Will you do that? But don’t come back out with her.”
Becky nodded, and, happy to be on a mission, ran up the ramp into the big helicopter.
Ferguson was a few strides from the fence now. Alice started jogging toward him, wincing at the pain in her chest and side.