Resurrection (Eden Book 3)

by Tony Monchinski

  Little Red accepted the compliment without a word. She retrieved her karambit from where it lay near the disemboweled woman. The woman was still alive, slumped on her knees. She’d ceased trying to stuff her intestines back inside her stomach.

  The woman stared up at Little Red, and there was a glaze stealing over her eyes.

  “P-please…”

  Red reached down and pulled her chop stick out of the woman’s torso.

  “What do we do about her?” MacKenzie asked.

  “Leave her.” Little Red slung her pack over her shoulder. “Zed will be here soon. Keep her company.”

  The woman should have been dead by now, but she wasn’t, and Little Red’s words filled her with terror.

  “Get your boots on, Mac.” Little Red stood looking into the trees around them, satisfied they were alone, that there had only been these three. “We gotta get moving.”

  “Sure thing.” MacKenzie ignored the protests his body threw at him as he rose to his feet, reaching for his socks and boots. Whatever he was feeling, it wasn’t anything compared to what the woman kneeling there was experiencing. She kept mouthing the word please over and over but nothing was coming out.

  “Sure thing.”

  * * *

  Riley slid her left foot sideways, off the ground, opening up into a left front stance, that leg bent, her right leg nearly straightened behind her. As she transitioned to the stance, her right hand-balled and chambered at her side—snapped forward, the sleeve of her dobuk snapping the air. Riley lifted her right knee up, holding it in place momentarily, then her right leg shot forward in a snap kick, her hands going up to her face to protect her head.

  She moved through the poomse, blindfolded.

  Troi watched her friend from the sidelines, off the Dojang’s mats. Riley had practiced taekwondo all the years Troi had known her. Watching her now, as she had watched her friend on many other occasions, Troi was struck by the seemingly effortless power Riley put into each position of the form she practiced. Troi had studied with Riley on and off, but never developed the passion for the martial form her friend possessed. Troi knew enough to recognize this poomse as one of the higher level varieties. Taeguk pal jang or something it was called.

  Riley was a study in concentration, discipline, and focus. Her movements were fluid and choreographed from years of practice and single-mindedness. Absent-mindedness was more like it, Troi thought. Riley had explained it to her before. After awhile, the strikes and kicks became instinctual. The action became something that required little to no premeditation in the moment. The taekwondo-ist became so absorbed in the moment and the movements, it was an effortless action. Of course, it took years of dedication, if ever, to reach that point.

  Riley’s uniform, her dobuk, was white with black trim that matched the belt around her waist. Riley’s students called her Sabum-nim, or teacher. Riley was somewhere on the road to her sixth dan. Sahyun, or Master status, was conferred with the seventh and eighth-degrees.

  Taekwondo was an arcane martial art. It had little practicability against the undead, and Troi couldn’t imagine it had seen much use in the zombie wars.

  Where Riley’s hair was short and brown, Troi’s was long, straight and black. When she’d practiced taekwondo, Troi had to tie her hair up or it got all in her face and she couldn’t see.

  Riley’s right leg snapped up over her head before returning to the mat, behind her left foot. She shifted to a cat stance: her left foot slid back as she raised herself to the ball of her right foot; her left fist—palm-up—was drawn back and cocked at her side, ready to strike; her right hand was open—fingers extended together and rigid in a knife hand—and across her abdomen.

  Troi envied Riley her flexibility. Troi knew the poomse were more than just impressive looking floor exercises. They were the embodiment of the Hwarang-do, the code that governed taekwondo and its practitioners. Troi remembered there were five aspects of the code, but she could never recall more than two or three of them.

  Trustworthiness figured prominently. Troi considered Riley the living embodiment of that one. Riley was a loyal friend and always had been. She never got caught up in the petty bullshit that derailed other women’s friendships. Troi liked to think she didn’t herself either.

  Troi could tell, by the look of Rye’s hair, that the Sabum-nim had taught several classes today, and had probably sparred with the students of her advanced class. As the poomse unfolded, Riley engaged in an elaborate dance. It was a dance with a legion of invisible opponents, all of whom attacked her at once from every conceivable angle.

  Valor was another part of the code. The idea being that you never retreated in battle, even when the odds against you were overwhelming, even when they were coming at you from everywhere. Riley transitioned smoothly from stance to kick, from block to punch.

  Justice was the fifth part of the Hwarang-do that Troi could recall. Justice meant something about the taekwondo-ist being selective in the taking of life.

  Riley snap kicked with her left leg, but did not place her foot back on the mats. She rechambered the kick, her knee raised, her foot drawn back. Riley jumped up and kicked with her right foot, crying out Kihap as she did so, the energy exploding from her lungs and body into her invisible opponents. She landed in a right front stance, right arm held out in front of her, fisted palm steadied in a front block, protecting her trunk and face.

  Riley’s right fist and arm moved from a single knife-hand block to a reverse elbow strike. She delivered a reverse backfist with her left hand, followed by a front middle punch with her right. Riley finished in ba ro position, facing forward, fists at her waist. She bowed at the waist.

  “Nice, Rye.”

  Riley pulled the blindfold from her eyes and breathed, sweat beading her brow. “How long have you been there?”

  “A minute or two.” Troi tossed Riley a towel that had been set on a folding chair. “I don’t know how you do it blindfolded. I’d be afraid I’d crash into a wall.”

  “You get used to it.” Riley mopped sweat from her brow. Today had been a good day. Because these were her last classes for several weeks, she hadn’t held back. She’d gotten in some good sparring with her black belts, had the pleasure of conferring a black belt to a hard-working pupil, and challenged herself by running through a series of forms. “I didn’t think I’d see you until tonight. Something up?”

  “No, we’re still on for tonight. But yeah, something…I was at work today—at the hospital? These guys came in from the Outlands and—hey, you know what? Are you done here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you come with me to the hospital?”

  Riley looked at her friend, concerned. “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah, it’s just… It’ll be easier to explain to you on the way. Can you call Anthony and ask him to meet us there?”

  “What’s up? Is my dad…”

  “No!” Troi shook her head emphatically. “I swear, this whole thing is bizarre, but it has nothing to do with your dad. I was at work and Evan came in with this. Look, take a shower and get dressed and I’ll explain everything on the way, I promise. And I promise—it’s nothing to worry about.”

  “If you say so…Give me five minutes.”

  The Zombie Slayer

  “Again,” Evan said quietly to his friends in the hospital hallway, outside the door to the room, “Thanks for coming.”

  “Yeah, sure, Ev.” Anthony acknowledged his friend’s gratefulness. “But what’s this about?”

  Anthony and Riley were a little concerned, because Evan had described the horrid state of the man in the next room so vividly.

  “You’re going to see.” Evan then turned to Riley and Troi. “You don’t need to be here if you don’t want to be.”

  “I want to be,” Riley said.

  “I don’t,” said Troi. “I’ve been in there already…” a look of revulsion crossed her face as she considered the door to the patient’s room. “So if nobody minds…”
/>
  “Nobody minds,” Billy assured her. “Thanks Troi.”

  Without another word, Troi turned and walked to the end of the hall and the nurses’ station there. The indistinct conversation of nurses floated to them.

  “Okay, now remember,” warned Evan, “these guys are pretty out there. The doctors think the one guy, in the bed, has the worst case of plague anyone has ever seen. Ever. And, honestly, I think they’re right.”

  “We’ve seen plague, Ev,” said Riley.

  “Not like this you haven’t. The other guy, well, he’s autistic. But the two of them, they’re friends okay?”

  “Okay,” the brother and sister answered in tandem.

  “All right then.” Evan led the way into the room. His description of the man and his state had been horrific, and yet it was still not been enough to prepare Anthony and Riley for what they saw when they entered the hospital room and looked past the autistic man in the chair and the white-gowned doctor standing by the bed.

  “Oh…” Anthony put a hand over his mouth. He turned from the figure in the bed and walked out of the room.

  Riley followed him into the hall a few moments later.

  “You gonna be okay, Ant?”

  The man in there, Riley thought, he was bad off, but she had seen worse. When Riley was training in the Defense Forces, there had been an accident—a malfunction—and a helicopter had crashed into a crowd. Body parts and machine components were scattered all over the place. Riley and her squad had been the first responders to the scene.

  So she had seen the raw ugliness of death and dying up close. The carnage of that helicopter accident—that had been the most horrible thing she had ever seen firsthand. But Riley had to admit that the man in the bed…well, he was a close second.

  “Ant. You gonna be okay?”

  “Yeah, I just…” Anthony looked at his sister. There was a look on his face like he was disappointed in himself. “You know.”

  “I know.” She did. “You don’t have to go back in there if you don’t want to.”

  “No, no.” Anthony was resolved. “I’m okay. I’ll be okay.”

  He thought about why he was even here in the first place. He thought Evan had better have a damned good reason to want to show him this. Evan wasn’t the type of friend, or even the type of guy, who would have invited Anthony along solely because he had back stage passes to this freak show.

  He steeled himself and walked past his sister, back into the room. He focused on all the other details of the place, except for the bed and the thing in it. He thought if he did so, he could zone out and ignore the obvious horror lying there—the man oozing fluids into a blanket of gauze.

  Evan stood off to the side, near the doctor. He clutched a small pad of paper and a pen. He was watching Anthony and, Anthony saw, his friend was also watching Riley. It registered then for Anthony that maybe his friend had feelings for his sister. He wondered if this were true, and how he had never noticed it before.

  The autistic man was at the bedside, just as Evan had described. The man sat in his chair with his legs drawn up, knees to his chest. He had a hand up close to his face, and looked like he was picking invisible hairs off his knuckles as he rocked back and forth to a rhythm only he was aware of.

  A movie played on the telescreen on the wall. “He’s with us till he shows us he’s against us,” Colin Keith-Johnston’s Tunstall was saying of Paul Newman’s William Bonney.

  The doctor considered Anthony, then remarked to Evan. “You were right.” The comment was lost on Anthony, who found himself the object of the doctor’s following question. “I’m Dr. Rheem. Are you alright?”

  “Yeah, sorry about that. Is he…”

  “He comes and goes.” Doctor Rheem apprised the man’s conscious state for the two newcomers.

  “Doesn’t look like he’s here now,” Riley said.

  “Mickey?” Evan called out to the man. “Can you hear me?”

  Anthony agreed with her. “How can he live like that?”

  “This man’s condition,” offered Doctor Rheem, “is what some of my colleagues would call a medical miracle.”

  “A medical miracle?” Riley scoffed. “Damn.”

  Anthony noticed the array of tubes plugged into the man’s bare limbs, his arms and legs largely denuded of flesh. What wasn’t raw and watery was blistery and folded in on itself. Various equipment around the bed hummed, and lights flashed intermittently.

  The autistic guy murmured something.

  “What’s he saying?” Riley asked the doctor.

  “Something about numbers.”

  “…eight-two-nine-six. Six and two is eight, and eight is one less than nine, and what’s between six and eight, seven. Nine minus two is seven and eight minus two is six, two sixes, there are two sixes…”

  Anthony and Riley both looked at the doctor, but Rheem had no answer. Evan scribbled in his note pad. “I’ve been writing down what he says.” He offered by way of explanation. “There has to be a pattern—something.”

  “What is this?” Riley indicated the movie on the telescreen.

  “We don’t know,” said Evan. “Something called The Left Handed Gun. They came in with it. He—” Evan indicated the autistic man “—had it.”

  “Oh, Mortimer…” The man on the bed spoke. “We have visitors…”

  Anthony almost took a step back, but forced himself to stand there, staring down at Mickey. The guy’s eyes were unfocused and milky. They looked like they were swimming around in his head.

  “Mortimer—is that his name?” Riley asked Doctor Rheem about the autistic man.

  “No, that’s not my name.” The man did not look up as he plucked another hair from his knuckles. “I’m Gary. You know, like the Gary Shandling Show.”

  “Then who’s Mortimer?” Anthony wondered aloud.

  “Die for the people, Mortimer!” Mickey cried out. Then he whispered, as though confidentially, “He’s an expert on death scenes, you know.”

  “What’s he talking about?”

  “He just does that sometimes.” Rheem looked sad. “He’s mostly quiet, but then he’ll blurt out something incoherent.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” said Evan.

  Gary hummed a tune.

  “It makes sense to him.” Anthony nodded as Mickey continued his harangue.

  “Mortimer…Mickey’s rival.” The rotting man sounded amused. “Oh my. Who would Minnie choose? Who do they always choose? Best ask Breathed, or maybe Opus to consider his Magnum. Oh Mortimer, your ear…who bit you? Ask Opus…Opus will know. Live is life?” He posed this last as a question. “Well, then certainly…na-na, na-na-na. Ack. That damned cat…” Mickey continued to babble incoherently.

  “Wait—that part there, that’s from a song.” Riley turned to Evan. “You writing this down?”

  “As fast as I can.”

  “What am I humming?” Gary asked, but no one answered him. “This is the theme to Gary’s show, the opening theme to Gary’s show…”

  “And I think he was talking about Mickey and Minnie Mouse there,” suggested Anthony. “That whole Disney thing.”

  “So maybe its not just random patter?” said Rheem. “Maybe whatever he’s saying refers to actual things? Real things?”

  “Things that were real,” said Evan, as he scribbled furiously to get it all down.

  Riley looked sadly upon the man in the bed. “Real to him.”

  “How old is this guy?” Anthony asked Rheem.

  “Hard to tell. The plague…we’ve never seen anyone like this. Ever. The amount of skin he’s lost, he shouldn’t be here.”

  “Come on.” Evan admonished, looking up from his notepad. “Don’t talk that way in front of him.”

  Anthony looked down on the man and felt despondent. “What has he been through?”

  “What has he seen?” Riley leaned down towards him. “What have you seen, mister?” She forced herself to breath through her mouth. They had cleaned the guy up as best the
y could, but he still stunk like rotting meat.

  Mickey’s eyes locked on her. “I have seen things none of you would believe…attack ships ablaze off Orion…I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the …all those moments to be lost in time, like tears…”

  “He’s quoting something again, isn’t he?” Riley looked from the doctor to Evan. She asked Mickey directly, “Are you quoting something?”

  Mickey laughed, the effort sending extra pus oozing out of his skin.

  “Proud of yourself, little woman? This is for Phil. Crack. Ouch!” The man feigned pain as it played out in his mind—some scene known only to himself.

  “He’s quoting Blade Runner.” Anthony shook his head in disbelief. “I show that movie in class.”

  Riley looked at him for an explanation.

  “We read Philip Dick’s book and watch the movie.”

  Riley looked at the doctor. “So he is quoting movies. Is everything this guy says from a movie?”

  Rheem spoke to Evan. “Try showing him the picture.”

  Evan placed his notebook and pen on top of one of the pieces of medical equipment, then opened the notebook and pulled a photograph from it.

  “Hey, that’s ours.” Gary stopped rocking and eyed the photograph in Evan’s hand. “Where’d you get that?”

  “You gave it to me. Remember?”

  “You know…” Gary remarked to Anthony without making eye contact. “You look like that guy. Are you that guy? That’s silly. How could you be that guy? That’s silly, right?”

  Evan handed the picture to Anthony. Riley stood next to her brother, looking over his shoulder. They both stared at the man and woman in the picture.

  “That’s right,” agreed Evan. “Silly.”

  “That’s you, little brother.”

  Anthony didn’t understand it. The man in the picture did look like him. Just like him. It was uncanny.

  “Evan, where…”

  Evan indicated the man on the bed.

  Anthony looked at Mickey warily before taking a step closer to his bedside and holding the snapshot up. “Who was this guy?”