The undead were everywhere, in numbers which shook Courtney to her core. And they were faster and stronger than she had anticipated. She was forced, over and over again, to turn away from the direction she wanted to go and was soon lost in a thick forest that seemed to go on forever in every direction. Without thinking, she pulled out her Smart phone to Google her position, however the screen was blank.
“This might have been a mistake,” she whispered.
Chapter 11
Scorpions in a Bottle
9:51 a.m.
Escaping The Zone was practically an impossibility for everyone. At first, Eng drove the Nissan one handed while he kept his other sweaty hand on the blue/black handle of his .38. Driving this way was fine in the motel parking lot and on the side street, but things in The Zone were deteriorating fast and, eventually, he gave Anna a hard look and stuffed the gun in his pocket. “Don’t try anything,” he hissed. “Or I swear you’ll go down with me.”
“What would I try?” she asked, innocently. They both knew she would try something; that something being wholly dependent on the timing and the circumstance they found themselves in. That something would also depend on how she could benefit from the situation. As Eng drove, she kept her eyes open for the least chance. Soon she found that escaping from Eng wouldn’t increase her chance of living.
The morning was filled with the undead. They came out of the fog, lurching and moaning in obvious hunger. Some were like Von Braun had been, black-eyed and hating everything, even the very air they breathed, and some were brain dead but otherwise whole. These were very fast, like sprinters. Most however were bloody and missing chunks of their body, sometimes very large chunks. It didn’t seem to weaken them in the least but it did slow them down.
They attacked cars on sight.
It was all Eng could do to keep them off the Nissan. He swerved all over the highway and sometimes drove on the shoulder or the median. There were other cars on the road but not many and they drove in the same wild manner Eng did. They flashed their lights and honked but what they were trying to get across wasn’t obvious until Eng came to the first roadblock.
It was mobbed by hundreds of cars. They were crushed in so close to the barricade that no one could move. “Stay back. Don’t get too close,” Anna said, laying a hand gently on his arm. She pulled the rear-view mirror around to check her face. A sigh escaped her at what she saw; she was scratched and bruised and the circles under her eyes were pronounced. She tried on a winning smile. Hoped it would be enough and then she ran her fingers through her hair.
“What are you doing?” Eng asked.
“You want to get through the road block? This may be the only way.” With her hair done as well as it could be, she reached for the door handle but Eng stopped her.
His eyes were slitted but the suspicion shone right through. “This may be the only way you get through but how do you plan on getting me through? Are you going to tell them I’m your adopted brother? Or your servant?”
The truth was neither. She had actually planned on using tears and a declaration: “That man raped me!” She would show her scabs and the rope burns on her wrists. She would also tell about his gun and he would either pull it out and get shot by real warriors or he would skulk back into the crowd, while she would use her looks and a faked timid persona to get in close. She was sure, that given time, she would be able to sweet talk her way across. “I’ll think of something,” she assured Eng. “Don’t worry.”
“No. I want a plan,” he replied. They were two scorpions in a bottle and neither was going to trust the other. “We cannot take a chance on you winging it. Look.” He pointed toward her window. Zombies were crossing a field of wild grass coming toward the cars. For now, their numbers were manageable, below a dozen, and people were already taking aim with rifles. “We passed hundreds on the road. They’re going to hear the guns and they’ll come running.”
“Son of a bitch,” Anna said. In order to run her sweet talking mouth, she needed time. “Turn the car around.” Guns were already popping off as he swung around and turned back east.
Both of them were without their cellphones, having lost them back at Walton, and so they drove in a meandering path, looking for one of the hidden ways out of The Zone. As far as Anna could tell, there weren’t any and, to make matters worse, the number of zombies continued to grow as the morning progressed. Three hours passed under the running tires. Sometimes they trundled along at walking speed hoping that a thin parting of the trees would mean they were coming up on an old logging road, other times they raced among the forest trails or on narrow roads with zombies converging on them from all sides.
During all this, Anna watched Eng, looking for the perfect opportunity to escape. All she needed was a moment where he grew tired and let his attention lapse. It never came and finally she slumped in the passenger seat. “So what do we do?” she asked. “You’re the super spy. What does your training say we do?”
“My training never covered zombies,” Eng replied; there was a pause and then he smiled; it wasn’t something he was all that good at. It made him look ill. “We never covered any of this.”
“Then what do we do?” she asked again. “We can’t just drive around in circles until we run out of gas.” When Eng shrugged, she almost rolled her eyes, but only just remembered the gun and the fact the man was a lunatic, an ass and a sociopath. She almost discounted him as she was mentally ticking off her very dubious assets: her looks, one vial of deadly serum, a car with half a tank of fuel, and a Chinese spy. His potential was limited since he really didn’t understand Americans—but then again neither did the vial of Com-cells or the Nissan, she realized. They were just tools.
So far, they had counted on getting lucky to find a way out, now she analyzed the problem from a purely scientific point of view. First was to formulate a hypothesis, a guess based on her understanding of the variables before her. The variables being tens of thousands of zombies, a few thousand survivors clamoring to get out of The Zone and some hundreds of soldiers and law enforcement officers tasked with keeping the other two in.
She understood zombies perhaps better than anyone. By using a combination of drugs and channeled hate, they could be controlled to an extent. She had proved that with Von Braun, however he was, in all likelihood, dead, and she was out of drugs. The cops and the soldiers could be controlled as well, again to an extent, but she was limited with this variable as well because of the urgency of time. This left the survivors, the citizens.
She smirked. “They aren’t normal citizens, they’re Americans.” Just as many academics did, Anna felt herself above concepts of nationalism and she tended to look down her nose at Americans, and at the same time, she somehow found honor or purity in cultures other than her own no matter their level of abject poverty, or their lack of freedom or the societal rot that had them fleeing to America. She saw Americans as fear-filled, gun-toting hicks, and had, among their other lesser qualities, a deep-seated phobia of the very government they voted for year after year. She could use that just like any other tool.
Cody Cullin, the YouTube star, had guessed about the accidental circumstances that led to bloodshed, Anna was planning a purposeful massacre. “Let’s go back to the road block at I-55. I have a plan.” She wasn’t about to get eaten alive, even if she had to cross out of The Zone tramping over a thousand bodies.
She chose the roadblock at I-55 for one specific reason. Yes, it had looked like all the rest: cars squished together with barely any room to open a car door. And of course, there was also a slew of angry citizens, guns, cops and zombies. The lucky difference was the deep brook on The Zone side of the barricade. This strip of water thirty feet wide more or less held back the zombies. For her plan to work Anna was going to have mingle with the people and there was no way she was getting out of the Nissan with zombies about.
“Wait until I scream,” she said to Eng, after explaining her plan.
“Yes,” he said curtly. She was gl
ad to see his face was set and she hoped she looked as cool and calm. Out of habit, she checked her look in the glass of the passenger side window and then started picking her way through the cars. Most were jammed with either people or belongings as though entire homes had been condensed and crushed down to fit through a car door. The people inside, with their laps overflowing with useless electronics or dogs or even other people, stared as Anna strode past.
Men stood outside the cars. All were armed, many chain-smoked. They too stared at Anna. No one seemed to notice Eng following after with his right hand stuffed into his jacket pocket.
“The army doesn’t have a plan for us,” Anna said to a group of men who stood behind an SUV thirty feet from the wire and the felled trees across the road. They’d been talking in quiet voices, casting hard looks at the handful of soldiers blocking their path. They raised their eyebrows at the woman in the stained lab coat. “There is no cure,” she added and then moved on to the next group.
“I just came from Albany. The Governor just agreed to fire-bomb Poughkeepsie and we’re next,” she said to them.
One of the men said: “They said they’re working on a cure.”
“I’m sure they are but it won’t come in time to save us. These things take years.”
“How do you know?”
She flapped her singed white lapel at the man. He had a faded cap on his head and wore a checkered shirt stuffed into dirty jeans. In his hand was a gleaming rifle that had obviously been better cared for than any of his other possessions, likely even better than his wife and kids. If he had graduated high school, she would’ve been surprised. “I have a doctorate in microbiology. I worked on the project that started this. Take it from me, you and everyone here will die if we don’t get through that barricade.”
Another man pushed through the group. With his suit shiny at the knees and his shoes scuffed, he looked to Anna like an insurance agent and perhaps it was his white-collar garb that allowed him to command the others. “No. Don’t listen to her. They said the army is on the way.”
“They are, but not to rescue us. Listen. We’re in a status A quarantine. No one gets out. Period!” The group began to grow angry, but Anna knew it would take more than words to stir these people to violence. They were moronic patriots who put God and country over the value of their own lives. “If you don’t believe me maybe you’ll believe this.” She pulled the sleeves back on her lab coat showing the ugly red marks where Eng had tied her to the bed.
“What is it?” the man with the checkered shirt asked.
The insurance agent knew. “She’s been tied up,” he said with a growing realization in his eyes.
“They tried to keep me from getting out to warn you,” she said. “But now that you know, your lives are in even greater danger. They won’t let you live no matter…Oh my God!” It wasn’t exactly a scream, however Eng caught on that now was the time. He fired the pistol from inside his coat.
The stubby .38 was a dreadfully inaccurate weapon at ranges beyond fifteen feet and only three of his bullets hit anything other than air. Luckily, for Anna a bullet went through one of the cruiser’s windows, shattering it. In a second, the soldiers and the troopers returned fire and, keyed up as they were, the citizens began shooting as well. Many were killed, but their rifles were deadly and there were so many more of them.
Four of the six soldiers guarding the barricade died in the first flash of gunfire, another was holed through the neck and would slowly bleed to death over the course of the afternoon. The last fell on his face and cowered as lead flew all around; glass flew like shrapnel and tires blew.
Then there was silence. The citizens came out from behind their cars to see what they had done. It wasn’t pretty, death never was. A few looked at Anna, none did so with blame in their eyes. They blamed themselves or tried to believe they had missed, that the expensive scopes on their rifles were lying, deceiving their eyes.
“I’m getting out of here,” the man with the checkered shirt said. He hurried for his truck, bringing on an exodus that bordered on panic. Barricades were plowed over and at least two of the corpses were mangled to a point where recognition was impossible.
Anna started scanning the vehicles, looking for one which might have room for her, but most looked to be filled to over-flowing, and the few that appeared to have room shied away from her and her lab coat. Everyone knew lab coats meant germs.
Eng wouldn’t have let her go anyway. He came sidling up to her, his hand coming out of his pocket with the hunk of hot metal. “Let’s go,” he said, threatening with the pistol.
“Aren’t you going to thank me?” she asked, unable to take her eyes from the weapon.
“No. You did what you did to save yourself, not to save me. Come on.” He started escorting her to the Nissan parked at the back of the mass of cars, only the rush to leave made it too dangerous. Cars were thumping into each other and scraping paint in their owner’s haste to get out of there. Anna and Eng were forced to wait on the side of the road until the last few cars shot by before they could get to their Nissan. Eng didn’t zip out of there like the others. He drove slowly until he came up near to the barricade.
He’s going for the guns, Anna thought. On his side, there was a black assault rifle sticking out from underneath one of the sagging cruisers. On her side, still in the grip of a dead trooper was a 9mm Glock. She decided she would go for it if he stopped the car.
I’ll be quick. I’ll be quick. I’ll be quicker than he is, she thought to herself, trying to psyche herself up. It was a life or death decision. She would dive for the gun and come up firing and he would die because the rifle was long and would be slow to bring to bear on her. He would die and her problems would be….mostly over.
Her hand was on the door handle when movement caught her eye. The one soldier still alive was on his knees and reaching for his own weapon. “Eng!” she screamed, grabbing his arm. The soldier’s gun was coming up in what felt like slow motion, its bore looking like a black eye searching for her.
Eng was more than willing to let the soldier kill Anna, however he didn’t like his own chances against a man armed with an assault rifle while he only had the .38. He stomped the gas and the Nissan leapt forward. It was a nimble and quick car, but it could not outrun a bullet. The back windshield blew inwards and then there was thudding sound, as though someone was smacking the car with a hammer. Next, there was a “bang” and the car started shuddering as it drove.
Anna crawled down into the footwell and hugged herself until they were out of sight and the awful thunder of the gun had ceased. She sat up and stared out the back. The Nissan was in a poor state: the upholstery was shredded, there were holes big enough for her to put her thumb through all over its hide, and there wasn’t a single window left intact. The back tire on the passenger side had been struck and now they were shedding vulcanized rubber at a rate that couldn’t be maintained. Soon it became a lurch and then there came the squeal of metal grinding on pavement. Only then did Eng stop.
He brought out the .38. For the moment it hung at the end of his arm, pointing at the ground. “Let’s see how good you are with a jack.”
“Me? That soldier is just down the road. He could be here in a few minutes.”
“Then you better hurry,” Eng said, icily.
She didn’t like the sudden quiet of the nearby forest. It made her feel very much alone with a psychopath. “You still need me.”
“Yes, I need you to change the tire. Now let’s go!”
She wasn’t weak or ineffectual in any way; she had changed tires before but the tire would remain forever unchanged. Going to the rear of the vehicle, the biting odor of gasoline struck her nostrils. “Aw, shit,” she said in a whisper. The tank had caught a bullet as well and beneath the car was a growing puddle.
“You still need me,” she reminded Eng. He had grown uncomfortably still and quiet, much like the forest around them. He glanced back the way they had come and then brought up the pisto
l, pointing it her way.
Chapter 12
Reunion of the Damned
10:32 a.m.
Ryan Deckard sighed for the thirtieth time and when he did, he made sure that it was loud enough not just to be overheard but to piss some people off as well.
“Do you have something to say,” Special Agent Meeks asked. He wore a smarmy smile but with the blue biohazard suit and the mask, it wasn’t seen. Deckard didn’t need to see it, he felt the arrogance of it come right through the plastic.
“I sure do,” Deckard said. He’d been leaning against one of the tent supports, but now he stepped close so that Meeks had to tilt his head up to see the taller man. “Why don’t you stop being a dick? This isn’t an interrogation. This is you preening for the camera.” A bagged camera had been brought into the tent to record Thuy as she explained at length what had happened at Walton. She was constantly being interrupted by the sanctimonious Meeks.
Thuy had stood firm during it all and really didn’t need a protector, especially when the bullying was scientific in nature, however Deckard could only take so much.
“I will get to you and your so-called ‘security arrangements’ soon enough,” Special Agent Meeks sneered.
Deckard snorted both figuratively and literally. “Here’s all you’ll get out of me.” He hocked up a ball of snot and shot it in a gob to splash against Meeks’s face shield. The agent did a herky-jerky dance and, backing away from Deckard, he tripped over Chuck Singleton’s long legs. The Okie had done nothing to keep it from happening.
John Burke grinned, showing the gaps in his grill. “That was a bit of alright for a city-boy. Now, iffin, y’all wanna see how we spit out in the sticks, I’ll show you a thing or two. I can shoot a line of skoal twenty feet and smack a bull-finch right ‘tween the eyes.”
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