The blood lust was too strong for her to understand a single word; all she cared about was getting to that throat and chewing through the salty skin. She could see blood pulse beneath that soft covering of flesh. It made her stomach feel like an empty fifty-gallon drum.
“Can you hear me?” McMillan asked, giving her another shake. When all he got was the same inhuman growling, he decided that the police would have to deal with the little psycho. He turned Jaimee Lynn around and tried to walk her to his truck. It was impossible. The girl acted as though she would rather rip her own hair out by the roots than get in the truck. He was compelled to take her by the back of the filmy hospital gown she wore and lift her bodily in. The girl spazzed like a demon-possessed cat, making McMillan curse, spittle flying from his lips as he forced her into his truck.
In order to shut the door behind him, he had to let go of her with one of his hands. Wet and sleek and adder-like, she spun in his grip and sunk her teeth into his wrist. It hurt like bloody-hell, making his lips twist. He tried to pry her off only she had latched on and began to make dreadful sucking noises as she drank his blood. This, more than the pain, overcame what little compassion he had for the waif.
In order to get her off of him, he punched her twice in the temple. He pulled the first blow because she was so small and frail, but when that didn’t work to get her teeth out of his flesh, he gave her a proper thump using all his strength. Her eyes went in two different directions and her jaw went slack.
She looked at him dully.
“I’m sorry,” he said defensively. All he could think about was that no one would believe that he had to hit her. What would his wife have to say about it? Or his friends? Shit, what would the police think? “I’m sorry, but you made me hit you. It’s your fault.”
Jaimee Lynn began blinking as if waking from a deep dream. The punches had shaken her and for some reason it made her hunger less, which allowed her to think with a little clarity. This was a man next to her and a big one at that. She could never eat him because he was too strong.
“I need a small one,” she said, in a raspy voice, picturing a child in her mind. It was a girl child with yellow hair, a gap-toothed smile, and a pointy chin. She was familiar, only Jaimee Lynn couldn’t put a name to the girl, not realizing that she was picturing herself—the Jaimee Lynn she was used to seeing in the mirror.
“You can talk?” McMillan asked, surprised. “Well, good. You can explain to the police why you bit me.”
“Because I’m hungry, very hungry,” she said, rubbing her stomach. She began to feel the hunger start to override her thinking again. It was his blood, she realized. She couldn’t be that near so much clean blood without it overcoming her.
McMillan leaned away from the girl, disgusted by her answer. It had been a frightfully honest answer. “You should tell that to the police. Say it just like that.” He reached into his pocket for his keys just as she reached for the door handle.
“Bye,” she said, as she pushed the passenger door open and fled into the rain.
“Hey!” McMillan yelled after her. He jumped out of the truck but she was running like a rabbit and he didn’t even take a step. “Fuck,” he grumbled, standing in the slanting rain, feeling it wash away the blood that leaked from his wounds. They ached, dully. A check of the side mirror showed him that he would probably need stitches in his neck. “What a pain in the ass,” he mumbled, knowing that his day was shot.
Once he had called his boss and explained that he’d been attacked by some drugged-up “guy”—there wasn’t any way he was going to say it had been a little girl—he went to the emergency room where he waited, along with thirty others, to be seen by a doctor. Soon a headache began to throb behind his eyes, which wasn’t helped by the fact that the hospital staff seemed to be moving in slow motion.
After an hour, the pain was so bad that he was rolling on the floor, practically in tears. This bumped him up in priority and very soon, he found himself on a gurney with a sheet drawn around it as its only privacy. Everything was too bright and too loud. It made him want to puke.
The Com-cells were replicating with unbelievable quickness, making his nerves feel like there were live wires attached to each. When he started to scream, an IV was hooked into his arm. In a minute, the fire in his mind was doused so that it was only a pile of smoking embers. “Ah, better,” he sighed.
“It’s better for us, too,” someone on the other side of the sheet muttered just loud enough to be heard.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” McMillan growled. He wasn’t in any mood to take crap from anyone.
“Nothing,” a second voice answered. This one was female. She began whispering. The nearly inaudible hissing bothered McMillan. What was she saying? Was she saying something about him? Something about why his head was pounding and his eyes were going blurry? What did she know and why didn’t she speak up? Was that on purpose? Was she trying to tease him with her secret knowledge?
The very questions bothered him as well. He was very confused and he wasn’t one who was normally confused about anything. Generally, he was sure of his facts. For instance, he knew he was supposed to be here for some stitches, yes, that was a real fact, but where had the headache come from? Were they releasing something into the hospital air? Some sort of poisonous gas? But if so, why was he the only one affected? No one else had complained about headaches. Maybe it was something they fed him or it maybe it was in…”
McMillan eyed the IV bag with sudden fear. It was half-empty. How did it get so empty, so quickly? How long had it been in his arm? Certainly minutes only.
His watch would verify that, only the numbers were twisted tick marks, and the hands jumped about on the face, appearing here and there without rhyme or reason. Tapping it didn’t help either; everything blurred so that it didn’t look as though he was even wearing a watch; it looked like a leather strap that would hold him down and keep him there forever.
“They drugged me,” he whispered, in dread.
The IV came out with a firm tug and blood oozed from the wound—it was darker than it should have been but not yet black. Next, the blood pressure cuff made a sound like a roar in his ears as he tore away the Velcro and, finally, the monitors let out piercing tones when he pulled off all the wires that had been attached to him at some point.
McMillan tore aside the curtain to face his enemies. There were many of them, dressed in blue or green. One came up to him. “What are you doing out of bed?” She had the creaky voice of a witch and the cruel glint to her eyes to match it. McMillan knew her. She was the one who had stuck the IV in his arm. She was the chief poisoner.
He answered her question by punching her flush in the face. There was a hue and cry as she fell to the ground, her nose bent and gushing blood. For all of a second, McMillan stared at the blood; it was so cherry-red that he had to wonder if it was sweet.
Then men were charging him. McMillan was a big man and just then, against his enemies, he felt bigger still. And stronger, too. He flung people about as if they were made of paper. They were powerless against him, and the Emergency Room ran red with blood as he swung his heavy fists as though they were sledgehammers. People screamed in terror and their fear goaded him to more violence. Mercilessly, he stomped the ones who fell until their features were mush. Quickly, the ER emptied of people— all save for one individual. This one wore a shiny badge that sent shards of light burning into McMillan’s eyes and in his hands was a gun.
The gun fired three times before McMillan fell.
He had devastated the Emergency Room, leaving three dead in his wake, and yet it could have been worse. McMillan wasn’t yet contagious. The Com-cells had been fast getting to that stage, but now, as if directed by some unseen force they began to heal their carrier. For two hours, McMillan laid there as investigators took statements and wrote reports and photographed the chaos. Had it taken them two hours and ten minutes they would have been in for a rude surprise when McMillan opened his eyes.
>
Luckily, for them, the coroner had bagged the body before that could happen. McMillan was put on a slab and then slid into one of the “chillers” as the morgue technicians called the refrigeration units. This didn’t kill the Com-cells. No, they were far from dead. The only effect the below freezing temperatures had on the disease was that it multiplied at a more leisurely rate instead of the frantic pace that was usual.
Still, when the coroner slid open the slab the next day he was in for of a hell of a surprise. McMillan was covered in what looked like moss that was the color of ink as black as night. It was so dark that when he opened his black eyes the coroner didn’t even notice.
Three hours after running from McMillan, Jaimee Lynn had forgotten all about him. She was too busy eating the third child she had caught. The small humans were so much easier to catch than the big ones, and they were tastier, too. But they didn’t have much blood to them which meant they died quick and came back just as quick.
Jaimee Lynn was in an abandoned building sucking the blood right from the carotid of a third grader. She frequently smacked her lips, and her breathing was hot and quick. Behind her, Misty pawed at her back.
“Mine,” Misty said. “Mine.”
“In a minute,” Jaimee Lynn answered, shrugging off the hand. She bent again and slurped noisily, uncaring of the effect it was having on the “girl.”
Misty had stopped being a real girl an hour after Jaimee Lynn had left McMillan. Jaimee had caught her on the way to school and had throttled her with hands that were like mechanized steel. When Misty stopped kicking, Jaimee Lynn had drunk until her belly sloshed. She then dragged the little girl corpse off to the abandoned building and buried her under rusting iron, thinking she would make a nice treat for later, but then Misty came alive.
For the most part she just laid there looking up at the partially stove-in roof, listening to the rain creep all through the building. When she could talk, she didn’t have much to say beyond her name.
Jaimee Lynn thought she was stupid and guessed that she was that way because she had died. But she did have her uses. She did whatever Jaimee Lynn told her. No questions asked. She was like a robot slave. The next girl was the same way and Jaimee Lynn figured this last one would be as well. It meant they could eat one of the big people pretty soon.
Even while she was eating, Jaimee Lynn’s belly growled at the thought.
Chapter 10
Middlebush Massacre
8:58 a.m.
Chaos vied with confusion as operational adjectives. As every military operations officer knows, both are, at least to some extent, built into military plans since neither can ever be fully weeded out. What was occurring around Poughkeepsie was an exaggeration on par with madness. Bluntly, it was being described as an exceptional cluster-fuck, and it was no wonder: there was no plan in place to call up an entire division in six hours. It was simply an impossibility.
When Governor Stimpson started growing anxious at the slow speed in which the call-up was progressing, General Collins had to remind him that during Hurricane Katrina, it had taken three days to put a single brigade in place, and they didn’t have zombies to worry about on that occasion.
One issue they were having was that a disconcerting number of guardsmen had failed to show up mostly due to CNN running the unfounded story that a massive Ebola outbreak was occurring in the Mid-Hudson area of upstate New York. Another issue that Collins was having difficulty overcoming was that the only major north/south highway in that part of the state ran right through the quarantine zone and thus was unusable. Traffic jams grew like tentacles to entangle most of the northeast. The logjam of cars ran a hundred miles or more in every direction. Logistics had broken down, reinforcements were stranded, half-formed companies sat idle on the side of the road and orders were being given by officers sitting in cars fifty miles from The Zone, and those orders were based on hours-old information, assumptions or just plain guesses instead of cold facts.
And yet, things were progressing, albeit erratically. Squads of soldiers were straggling in and were being sent straight through to the lines. Sometimes, they came loaded down with equipment, sometimes with just their empty weapons. One squad showed up in their dress uniforms thinking there was a surprise inspection underway.
Officers began to find their rhythm as their minds shifted out of the civilian mode and into the military, and right up until 8:58 a.m., the situation was at least somewhat manageable. The number of zombies was being described as “light” and, except for a few tragic incidents, the citizens were afraid and angry, but not violent. At 8:58, at the junction of Albany Post Road and Middlebush, just south of the town of Wappinger Falls, where a barrier of barbed wire had been erected to delineate the ‘zone’ from the free area, an incident occurred, making things a hundred times worse.
The “Middlebush Massacre” as it would become known, was started by accident. Tensions were wire-tight and the fear on both sides of the barricade was like an easily communicable disease, spreading from person to person until both sides were on a hair trigger. An incident was bound to happen and a teenaged boy named Cody Cullin was determined to record it. His desire was for YouTube fame and already he had recorded a dozen zombie sightings, though he was the first to admit that, so far, his videos were dark and grainy and not very good. However, what he uploaded at 9:07 a.m. would be seen by thirty million people by the end of the day.
The video was amateurish and very narrow in its scope. What it didn’t show were the hundreds of angry civilians pushing to get out of The Zone, edging, closer and closer to the flimsy and lightly manned barricade. The people screamed obscenities, they revved their engines, menacingly, and those with guns held them at the ready. They riled themselves into a fevered pitch so that they were practically frothing at the mouth and yet all the video showed was one man yell: “You can’t legally stop us.” The man held a cellphone in his hand and, as he yelled, he gestured at the soldiers with it. Tempers had been on the knife’s edge all morning with fear causing the mundane to appear monstrous.
One of the soldiers, sweat stinging his eyes and his protective mask clouding his vision, panicked at the sight of the man pointing what he thought was a gun and fired his weapon pointblank into the man’s chest. Guns came up from every direction, however because of the angle of the recording it looked as though the three soldiers and the two state troopers were firing unprovoked into a small group of unarmed people.
The gun battle that followed was brief. The troopers with their shotguns and the soldiers in their heavy MOPP gear got off a few shots and then went down in a blaze of blood and screams; of course, this aspect of the one-sided fight never made it onto YouTube. All anyone saw was the first twenty seconds, and it was enough to make Cody Cullin an internet star.
For the rest of America, the shit had hit the fan.
Over the course of the next three hours, the video would trigger a dozen gun battles between citizens and soldiers. Sometimes the people won and were able to surge out of The Zone. Sometimes the soldiers were forced to shoot into a mass of humanity until the mobs broke and fled back into The Zone.
The first Courtney Shaw heard about the shoot-out she was sitting in her chair, eyeing her map of the area, as a state trooper bleated uselessly in her ear. The chair felt welded to her ass. In fact, her ass was so numb from sitting for so many hours on end that she couldn’t tell where it ended and the chair began. The same went for the headset that was molded to Courtney’s skull. It felt like some sort of vestigial horn that had grown in upside down, curving down her cheek instead of rising into the air. She was tired but determined to make every effort to help the very weird situation. She had lied—necessary, white lies, she told herself. She had manipulated those in power—another necessity. Now, adrenaline was keeping her going when her body just wanted to lied down.
“I honestly don’t care how long you’ve been on duty,” she said, tiredly to the trooper out of Peekskill. “You will turn your cruiser around
and get to Milton or you will be brought up on dereliction of duty charges. Those orders come from the Superintendent.” She paused and covered over the mike so she could speak with her partner. “Renee, have you heard anything from the Superintendent yet?” Courtney figured the man would have said something similar to the trooper, but wanted to cover her ass all the same.
Renee barely looked up from her board. “Not a freakin’ peep.”
Superintendent Ritz, on orders from the Governor himself, was supposed to be getting video proof of the zombies. He had left Albany at seven that morning and hadn’t been heard from since. He wouldn’t answer either his radio or his cell phone—it was more than a bit unnerving. In his absence and with the First Deputy Superintendent not up to speed, and the Assistant Deputy Superintendent a known jackass, Courtney was running the four thousand-man department. She was pulling troopers from every corner of the state to deal with the traffic and the zombies and the crazy quarantine zone and a thousand other things, including directing soldiers, many of whom were out in the middle of nowhere, too far for their radios to reach and without cell service for their phones.
Courtney’s mind was zipping along at a pace she didn’t think possible.
In a way, it was her Zone. Its shape was nothing like Governor Stimpson envisioned. He pictured a perfect circle with the Walton Facility as the epicenter. The real shape was somewhat like a paint-splatter. With the dwindling manpower she had to work with, it was far more economical and realistic to concentrate on certain areas that she deemed crucial to hold. In order to stop the spread of the zombies across the Hudson she had thrown in as many men as she could to hold the area around Highland. North of Poughkeepsie she had men spread out over miles of pretty farmland to keep Albany from being reached, but the most important area of all was to the south where three highways fed straight into New York City. The YouTube video was shot at the barricade at Interstate Nine, the central of the three highways.
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