Traveling at a breakneck pace on pitch-black dirt roads was unbelievably stressful. I was way out of my comfort zone—nothing but taillights, yellow-orange road dust, and tumbleweeds.
I glanced in the rearview mirror. “Pass the ammo bag up here.” Propped against a stack of clothes and rations, Chris opened an eye. “Crawl up his ass, Lizzy—we’ll eat less dust.”
I gritted my teeth and drew up even closer. “Ammo bag—don’t make me ask again.”
“What do you want with a spent ammo bag?” Ivan growled, his mood zigzagging darker.
“Ho Hos, Nutter Butters, Snickers bars, bags of yogurt covered pretzels, Cheetos—need I say more?” I raised a brow.
Chris tossed the back over the seat.
Outside of the short range of our headlights, there was nothing but deep blackness and the occasional undead straggler.
I swerved to miss hitting one.
Every few miles or so, we’d run across a pod of biters. Mostly, we blew past them. No one bothered to lift a firearm. Taking potshots at passing zombies was a waste of ammo.
We slowed to negotiate a dry river bed. “Fuck, these are good.” Ivan’s eyes rolled back in his head as he stuffed a chocolate-covered Ho Ho in his mouth.
I dipped into the bag and scored a six-pack of Oreos. “We have all those rations in the back, and I keep eating this stuff. What’s wrong with me?”
“Have you ever tasted an MRE? It’s not a Meal. It’s not Ready. And you can’t Eat it.” Ivan pulled a bag of Peanut M&Ms out of the sack. “Christ, this is better than a sack full of money.”
Lagging behind the Humvee, I stepped on the gas to catch up. “I could use some toothpicks to prop up my eyelids. Keep me awake—let’s hear your bite history. What happened in Ruwayshid?”
Four hours later, I’d heard it all. We’d passed Rutbah nearly a hundred clicks ago, but I hadn’t had the heart to wake Chris. And despite the occasional angry outburst, Ivan was behaving himself.
According to his story, the virus had ripped through Ruwayshid in less than forty-eight hours. The newly undead had swarmed, ravaged their way through town, and moved on. Here and there a few stragglers wandered the streets. Ivan had lured them underground and shoved them into the holding tank.
I made eye contact. “Yeah, we saw.”
“You also found the thermite grenades.” Zombie eyes squinted my way.
I nodded. “Those too.”
He took a moment to think about that. “The last message we got from central command was to hang tight—that a vaccine was on its way.”
I stared, open-mouthed. “You’re sure they said vaccine?”
“We were supposed to test the drug on prisoners.” He flashed a weird maniacal grin. “When you’re in the viper’s nest you must become a viper.”
“Spare me the samurai bullshit talk.” I swallowed. “And did the vaccine arrive?”
“Do I look like it arrived?” Ivan growled. “They just wanted to confirm we were there so they could retire us.” When I arched a brow, he clarified. “Make the desert sand glow…bomb the hell out of us…”
It was too dark to see much detail in those red-rimmed eyes, but the glints of anger and betrayal were real.
Straight out of the blue, a zombie hand shot out and grabbed my boob. Immediately, I shoved spindly fingers away. “Don’t be a perv, Ivan.”
That fucking zombie hand shot right back up like a motor reflex. No brain involved, just pure z-lust.
I pushed his hand away, this time with greater force.
A pistol cocked in the back seat.
“Do that again, Ivan. I’ve been looking for an excuse to blow your skull off.”
From the corner of my eye, I could just make out the pistol pressed against the zombie lord’s head. “Get control of yourself, Ivan,” I cautioned.
This time, those freaky zombie eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. And the look on his face was something between terror and…
Ivan pointed ahead frantically.
I turned my attention back to the road.
Fuck me. We were about to die.
I braked hard to avoid rear-ending the Humvee. Stomping on the pedal, I cranked the steering wheel and cleared the massive vehicle, but the car was sliding—out of control—in a massive cloud of dust.
Moving in a peculiar kind of slow motion, the car spun onto the shoulder, then back onto the road.
My inner gyro told me we’d changed places with Humvee, and come full circle. Now they were eating our dust.
“Pump the brakes, slowly.” Chris leaned over the front seat, and grabbed the wheel. “Steer with the slide—that’s it.”
The car slowed and came to halt, facing backwards. The Humvee rumbled to a stop, missing our front bumper by inches. I sat there frozen, white knuckles gripping the steering wheel, starring into the headlights of the military transport.
“You’re okay, Lizzy.” Chris was behind me, talking me down. “We’re all okay—you did great.”
I remembered to breathe. “What’s going on?” I gasped.
As if in answer to my question, the Humvee went dark. “Kill the headlights.” Chris slipped out of the BMW and moved up alongside the massive vehicle. There was a brief exchange I couldn’t hear.
“Where’s the Ducati?” I asked, wondering out loud.
“Fuck if I know.” The menacing zombie lord was back, eyes cold and gray, darting here and there.
I lowered my window and adjusted the rearview mirror. No view of the road yet. A massive plume of dust swirled around us, plus I couldn’t hear anything over the dieseling Humveee.
Chris drew his fingers across his throat, and Ahmed killed the engine. Seems like they were discussing the missing motorcycle, as well.
All of us strained to hear the whine of the bike’s engine. No varoooom-boom-boom. No mean machine tearing up the dirt road ahead of us. Nothing but clouds of dust blowing around us.
I got out of the BMW and trudged up the road against the wind.
“Lizzy—wait.” Chris jogged up beside me.
I squinted through the haze of fine particles. “Up ahead—what is that?” I stared until I made out a familiar shape. The Ducati sat in the middle of the beaten track, propped on its kickstand.
“Where’s Mustafa?” I asked.
Chris climbed down a steep bank that ran alongside the road. “Nothing but scrub brush down here.”
A strange, atmospheric noise reverberated in the air, and he turned toward me. “Do you hear that?”
I braced myself against a strong gust—shadowy, not so imaginary creatures lurked within this storm. “Sounds like someone tossed a thousand live snakes into a microwave.”
He nodded. “Z-winds.”
Chapter Eleven
“GUYS—GUYS. WE have to get the fuck out of this place, now.” I stood in the middle of the dirt road and tried pleading. “Please…guys…I’m in no mood to fight zombies.”
I was crashing hard from our sugar binge. Over the past four hours, Ivan and I had made a serious dent in the contents of the ammo bag.
Oreos. Yogurt covered pretzels. Peanut M&M’s. KitKat bars.
I desperately needed a nap. Make that a twelve-hour nap. “Is anyone listening?” I stifled a yawn and pivoted slowly, hoping for eye contact, but no one paid any attention to me.
The search was on for Mustafa.
The commandos fanned out on both sides of the road, while Chris rummaged inside the BMW. He emerged from the back seat wearing his helmet and night vision goggles. “Chill, Lizzy—we’ve got this.”
Ivan climbed out of the car jabbering on about hellfire missiles and a hardened bunker somewhere in the middle of the kill zone.
“Ivan,” I called to him, squinting through a gust of wind and sand. “Over here.”
Ahmed ordered his men to spread out along the ridge line. He spoke in a strange patois of French and Arabic. Roughly translated, I think he was saying some like, “Stay dark. Night vision only.”
Chris stopped to a
djust his goggles. “Lizzy, Ivan—get back in the car.”
Zombie man leaned closer. “Seventy-five clicks northwest of K1 there’s a bunker.”
I took a step back. “Ivan, why would they build a secret bunker in the middle of DMZ? Nothing makes it through—that’s why they call it the Dead Meat Zone. What would be the purpose of something like that?”
He looked so forlorn I apologized. “Sorry—I’m cranky. I’ve been driving all night, and I’m no longer high on Skittles.”
Zombie man’s eyes were steadier than I’d seen them in awhile. “They won’t fire on us.”
I chewed on my lip long enough to make a raw spot. “How do you know that?” I was chock full of doubts, but I was also curious.
Ivan lived and worked on the dark side. And according to Chris, it doesn’t get any sneakier or less trustworthy than black ops CIA.
“No more smoke and mirrors.” I stopped chewing and pressed him for answers. “A few hours ago all you talked about were drones. Kaboom! Remember?”
“I remember.” Ivan grinned and it was weirdly reassuring. CIA guys know things. They know about safe houses, and black sites. They run drug operations and secret assassins.
What if this bunker in the middle of the DMZ was one of them? I exhaled a loud sigh that I couldn’t hear over the din of the z-storm. We were about to get deluged by an undead force majeure and this secret bunker could save our tired assess.
A staccato of rapid fire broke the silence. Chris and the commandos had most likely run across the fast runners that always preceded the horde.
I experienced a flash of memory. I was back in the refugee camp the night we were overrun. A pod of biters had entered the compound—nothing security couldn’t handle. Then Delta Force arrived, rappelling down from a hovering helicopter. I thought about the fact that Chris had been piloting the chopper just above me.
Cheers had gone up, and the medical staff had breathed a sigh of relief. Grabbing my things, I turned to leave, only to freeze in my tracks. A mountain of zombies were climbing over each other, piling higher and higher against the fence. The swarm crested like a giant wave, and crashed through camp. We were deluged in seconds, not minutes.
A chill zinged up and down my spine.
I turned toward Ivan. “Get back in the car.” He actually seemed fairly normal at the moment, no eye rolls or spasms, and amazingly calm under the circumstances.
He settled into the driver’s seat of the BMW. “Come on, Lizzy, take a ride over to the bunker with me.” I noted the gleam in my co-conspirator’s eyes.
There was no time to argue with Chris or the know-it-all commandos. If we took off like a bat out of hell, Chris and the others would follow. I hesitated for less than a nanosecond, and climbed into the shotgun seat.
“Then, I suppose you should abduct me.”
Zombie man winked. “A little extraordinary rendition—one of my specialties.” He put the pedal to the metal and swerved off the road and onto a narrow trail that led south.
The going was rough. More than a few times we bottomed out, or careened off the beaten path. I swallowed hard and checked my seat belt. “Gnarly driving, Ivan.”
“In a few more minutes we enter the real DMZ.”
“So this is where we get blown to bits—on a fucking goat path.” My heart pounded an erratic rhythm inside my chest. “You better be right about this bunker.”
He glanced in the rear view mirror, and those murky opalescent eyes sparked to life. “Check it out.”
I craned my neck to see out the back window. Sure enough, the Humvee was eating our dust.
I scrunched down in my seat. “God, we’re in so much trouble.”
The faint whump-whump-whump of chopper blades caught my attention. I jammed my helmet on and flipped down the night vision binoculars. “There’s a helicopter out there dropping lines—troops on the ground.”
I zoomed in. A squadron of soldiers moved out in a stumbling, awkward fashion. I couldn’t make out faces. “Something odd about the way they move.”
“Smart zombies.” Ivan said.
I tilted the goggles back up. “Are you telling me there really is such a thing as smart zombies?” I shook my head. “That is so creepy.”
“Are you saying I’m creepy?”
“Anything that is dead and still walking around is creepy. And you’re not dead yet.”
When Chris had mentioned smart zombies earlier, I thought it was a joke. But that was before Ivan Ivanovich. Hybrid zombies weren’t that much of a stretch anymore.
Ivan shrugged. “They’re working on a new z-strain. Fight zombies with smarter zombies.”
I stared blankly out the windshield. “So, the United States of Frankenstein says—oops—we just unleashed the z-apocalypse on the world, but stay tuned—we’ve got a strain coming that’s faster, smarter and even harder to kill.”
I took another quick scan with the binoculars. More z-troops were landing on the ground. “I just have one question—who’s going to kill the smart zombies?”
Ivan peered at me over the rim of his imaginary reading glasses.
“I have no idea—scout’s honor, Lizzy.”
I snorted a laugh. Hard to believe Ivan was ever a boy scout. “How long until we reach the bunker?”
Ivan pulled a handheld GPS out his pocket. “The coordinates are stored on there—look under DMZ.”
A map of the DMZ popped up with a pulsing red dot. “Holy shit, we’re not that far away.” I looked up and gasped. “Ivan—”
He braked hard to avoid hitting a military man standing in the middle of the trail. The soldier held a red signal light and swung the device left—like he was directing parking lot traffic after a rock concert.
“Ivan, what’s going on?”
“Seems pretty obvious they’re expecting company.” He steered the car onto an adjoining road.
A checkpoint guard dressed in combat gear signaled for us to stop and roll down our window.
Ivan lowered the tinted glass. “Two double-doubles with cheese, and an order of fries—animal style.”
The soldier took a good look inside the car and consulted a clipboard. “With or without grilled onions…sir?”
Ivan’s mouth twitched. “What do you say, Lizzy?”
“I’d kill for an In and Out Burger right now.”
“You and me both, ma’am.” The young soldier’s gaze moved from me to Ivan. “Name, rank, and serial number if you have one.”
“Ivanovich. CIA. Assigned to the U.S Embassy Amman, Jordan.” He flashed his spy credentials.
The young man ducked down. “Ma’am?”
“Elizabeth Davis—Doctors without Borders—Physician.”
“Got you, right here.” The soldier checked my name off a list, and copied some information off Ivan’s I.D.
“There’s a U.S. Army Captain and a French spec ops team behind us—don’t take any shit off them.” Ivan winked.
“No sir—I won’t sir. Follow the road east, take a right at the T, and straight into the bunker.”
Ivan stomped on the gas.
“Sweet kid.” I exhaled a sigh. “God, we are so…barbaric. We send our children off to die in senseless wars.”
“Dead bodies. Undead bodies. Cracked bones. Mutilated flesh. Flaming fucking eyeballs. We love war, Lizzy. And we never learn—the world never fucking learns.” He snickered hard enough to rock his head back. A special kind of Colonel Kurtz madness had set in.
“Lead foot,” was the best comeback I could muster.
Ivan was a prime example of what happens to a person when they’ve been at war too long. But I was also beginning to understand that what disturbed me most about him wasn’t his lying black ops ways, but his truth-telling.
The BMW’s headlights barely illuminated the newly graded road. I strained to see through the dense, murky haze. “Are the brights on? I can’t see a thing out there.”
As soon as I said the words, the outline of a shape resolved itself into a fl
at-topped, smooth-sided superstructure. The pyramid at Giza with two-thirds of its top removed. The jaw-dropping stronghold was at least two football fields in length. A sliver of horizontal light swept the ground as gigantic bay doors opened. We drove past concrete walls at least twenty feet thick.
“The military calls this a bunker?” I asked, bug-eyed.
An aircraft hangar spread out before us. I counted a dozen or so transport and attack helicopters, even a few of those giant Chinooks. “This is more like a heavily fortified base,” I muttered, “with parking attendants.”
Two guards motioned us toward something that resembled an industrial strength car wash. Even Ivan appeared somewhat in awe. “They’re going to decontaminate the car.”
A team of workers opened the doors and the trunk. “We need you to step out of the vehicle.” They removed guns, ammo, rocket launchers, backpacks, and two cold bags full of the z-interferon. Even the snack sack was deposited onto a flatbed luggage cart like the kind used at airports.
“Ivanovich? Christ—I thought you were dead.” A military man, someone of rank, approached us.
“Half-dead or half undead…take your pick, sir.”
The military man did a quick study. Hard to miss Ivan’s overall condition. “Do you know your z-status?”
“Have no idea—I’m on the z-interferon. We’ll see.” Ivan gestured in my direction. “I’m under a physician’s care now.”
The barrel-chested officer with close-cropped gray hair and deep set eyes turned toward me. “Welcome to Strategic Z Command, Doctor Davis—good to have you on board. Kip Macmillan, Colonel, United States Army Air Command.”
The higher ups in the bunker already had our names. “Word travels fast out here in the desert. What’s your specialty?”
I shook his hand and tried not to wince. “Surgeon, sir.”
“So you made it out of Zaatari alive.” Something about Macmillan’s onceover felt wicked wrong. “You should see the surveillance footage. An entire square mile of tent city overrun in less than five minutes.” He shook his head. “I look forward to hearing your escape story.”
“Uh, it was pretty much luck, sir.” I muttered, unsure how to respond.
The colonel was also a mind-reader. “What happened at Zaatari isn’t going to happen here. This bunker is rock-solid. Steel reinforced concrete walls twenty-five feet thick. The bay doors are made out of carbon nanotubes—one hundred and seventeen times stronger than steel.” The man nodded toward the two giant doors. “We’re stocked and armed and in another few minutes we’ll be locked down. Nothing is getting in here.” The colonel smirked, military proud. “We’re going to sit back, and let the skin eaters pass over—hell, all we’ll need is a deck of cards.”
EAT, SLAY, LUZT: A sexy wild ride through the dark heart of the zombie apocalypse. Page 10