by Diana Graves
“He passed away last night,” I said quietly with my eyes on the desk.
“I’m sorry, Raina. Death is everywhere these days,” she said, and then there was some short lived silence between us. I didn’t look away from the desk until I heard her say, “Last night, after we left Bastion Fatal, our Humvee was attacked. Everyone was killed, even the Sergeant. They said they found him decapitated! I don’t remember it, but somehow I made it under the vehicle almost completely unharmed.”
I was confused for a moment before I remembered Michael’s little gift of hypnosis. Fillips well and truly believed that she and Sergeant Kelley paid us an uneventful visit last night, in which they left with all Gabriel’s work, and then were attacked on their way back to the base.
“Oh my goddess!” I said, turning my face of confusion into one of shock and concern. “They’re dead? How are you? Are you hurt badly?”
“Just some minor scrapes and bruises, probably from clawing my way under the Humvee. Somehow my left arm was pulled out of the socket and then fractured at the wrist.”
“You call that almost completely unharmed? Why are you back on the street? Don’t you need rest?”
“Compared to the others—I’m alive.” she said. “My joint’s been corrected, my wrist is bandaged good and tight and I can shoot one handed guns with my left as well as my right. If I can still shoot, I can still kill zombies.”
“HOOAH!” a random man yelled, having overheard her last sentence as she walked by him.
She frowned. “I feel like such a coward, Raina. What kind of officer just hides like that while her colleagues are getting slaughtered?”
“The kind of person who survives—. Maybe they were already dead when you hid,” I offered.
“That’s what the men who responded to my call said,” she said with an air of contemplation. “They said that between the amount of blood covering my uniform, and the fact that we only got one shot off, it was likely there were too many of them moving too fast for us to have time to react, and that all the men were dead before I hid myself and called for backup.”
“Sounds awful…”
“Yes, it was. I’m glad I don’t remember it. I wish I could say it was all worth it, but the doctors here can’t make heads or tails of Gabriel’s notes. The General in charge here told them not to waste their time with it. It’s great that Gabriel saved Katie’s life, but it won’t be much use to the men and women in the field. It might make the zombies easier to kill, but the application isn’t practical.”
“It’s not meant to make them easier to kill. It’s meant to give them back their humanity—sort of,” I said.
She let out a heavy sigh. “Still, it’s not practical in the field. I’ll call you when we get any news. There are very few large shelters like Bastion Fatal out there right now. Please thank Alistair for offering to take in as many survivors as we find.”
I didn’t know he’d made that offer to them. “I will.”
“Tell him to contact us if he’s low on rations, will you?
I said, “Definitely,” and her finger moved toward her phone to end the call. “Fillips,” I said abruptly and her finger stopped in mid-motion.
“Yes?”
“I—,” I didn’t really know what I wanted to say. Thank you, maybe. Amidst everything that was going on, she never missed a beat. She was an unwavering, loyal friend no matter the cost. I’d have to keep that in mind and repay her big time. “Be careful.”
She smiled. “Will do.”
She ended the call and the monitor went dark, but before the sound cut off, for just a fraction of a second I could have sworn I heard a man scream. I sat there for a moment, just staring at the blank monitor, trying to rationalize that one millisecond of utter horror. Did I hear that right? No, I couldn’t have. It’s daytime. The sun’s high in the sky and zombies burn…right? Yeah, but if the pain of eating themselves doesn’t stop them from doing that, what’s a little sunlight? Shit. I shook my head. These are trained men and women. They know what they’re doing. They’ve probably already dealt with the threat. And yet I couldn’t shake that sound; that scream. No gun shot, just a fraction of a scream.
Damn it! It was eating at me. Fillips was out there, injured. She wasn’t one-hundred percent. What the fuck was she doing in the field? “Fuck!” I cursed myself because it was my damn fault. She was hurt because of me. It will slow her down, maybe get her killed. Goddess damn it!
“Fuck!” I roared again as I stood from the desk, quick and violent. I knew what I had to do, but this was going to suck so fucking much.
When I got back to Alistair’s room, I made a hurried bee-line for his wardrobe and started rummaging for clothes that would cover me better than the borrowed dress I’d been wearing since last night…
“Where are you going?” Thomas asked me.
“A friend is in trouble. I have to help her.” I pulled out a heavy wool coat, black boots and a black draping detached hood. I pulled them on fast and looked back at Thomas and Isobel, sitting in the dark, watching Disney’s Aladdin on Alistair’s sixty inch flat screen television. They were my babes. How could I leave them again? How could I abandon them? What if I died out there? But I couldn’t abandon Fillips either…I closed my eyes tight and took a deep breathe. Every second I stood in uncertainty, Fillips was fighting for her life. I knew that much for sure…I think.
“When will you be back?” Thomas asked me.
I moved closer to them and hugged them both very tight, “Soon.” I kissed them and reluctantly left the room.
NARROWS BRIDGE
THE NARROWS BRIDGE was a ten minute drive from the Bastion. At a vampire’s pace, in the sun, it took me five minutes. I could hear the gunfire as soon as I stepped outside, and the closer I got the more sporadic the shots became. Were they winning or losing this fight? As I came up on the bridge, with its great green arches, it became all too clear. They were definitely losing. I was gobsmacked at the number of dead men on the ground. The zombies were rushing over the bridge in one great serge, trying to get into Tacoma from Gig Harbour. I ran into the midst of the combat.
Between the blinding sun in my eyes and the screams of men, I was a little disoriented at first. I was feeling the pain of the sun where it touched my bare skin here and there, but it was a manageable pain. What wasn’t manageable was the gross factor. The zombies were tattered corpses of swollen stinking flesh. But as rotten as they were, as broken and mangled and damaged, they fought without restraint with whatever bits of themselves they had left, eating and gnawing whatever they could get into their mouths.
I didn’t think to bring a weapon. Dumb, Raina, very dumb. Luckily there were plenty of guns on the ground from the fallen soldiers…not so lucky for them. Normally I’m a terrible shot, but I guess you don’t need too much skill to kill things with an MP 15/22. Even with terrible aim, it was almost as if I couldn’t miss them even if I tried…Or maybe it had more to do with the vampirism. Not that I was actively attacking the zombies. I was only defending myself as I searched for Fillips. I was looking for a little lady with mousy brown curly hair. Should be easy in the midst of such a macho crowd, but with the amount of chaotic carnage surrounding me, I’d have better luck finding Waldo in this mess.
“Fillips!” I yelled out.
“Who the fuck are you?” a soldier yelled over the gun fire as I knelt by him to check the covered face of a wounded officer he was caring for. It wasn’t Fillips. I didn’t answer him. I looked at the soldier for only a moment before getting up and moving along the road. Eventually I ran out of bullets and I had to beat my gun over the head of a tattered thing…I think it was a woman at one point, maybe. Hell I couldn’t tell what it used to be. Now it was a bloody pile of rot and teeth. One thump of the gun to her head and her skull busted wide open.
“Fillips!” I yelled again.
“Raina?” I heard her voice faintly. It was coming from clear across the bridge and I ran toward that voice.
“Fil
lips?”
“Raina?” she said again with a lot of strain in her voice.
I was face to face with a huge chunk of cement that blocked the bridge’s sidewalk from the main road so pedestrians could cross The Narrow’s safely. I jumped over the tall structure with ease and found Fillips on the other side. She was being ravaged by a zombie. He was trying to eat out her stomach, but her Kevlar vest kept him from reaching flesh so far.
With my gun in hand, I hit the thing in the head hard with an upward swing that sent his entire head flying off his neck. I didn’t see where it landed. I knelt at Fillips side and held her unbandage hand. It was slippery with blood. Her blood? No, it was far too gooey to be fresh.
“Thanks,” she grunted. I helped her get to her feet, all the while looking her over for wounds. “What the hell are you doing here?” she asked.
Besides saving your ass… “I thought I heard a scream before you hung up. I wasn’t sure how you’d fare with your injuries.”
She scoffed and picked up her weapon from the bloody sidewalk. “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” she said before she walked past me with determination in her eyes. She sighted down her gun and blasted two zombies who were heading toward us. Several bullets in a matter of seconds exploded each head in turn.
She moved on and I followed her out from behind the cement block. The wide bridge was a complete bloody massacre. There were more men on the ground than standing upright, more zombies feasting than fighting.
“Fuck!” Fillips shouted, and she started picking off the zombies that were down on the ground eating the dead and dying, then she’d shoot the men so they wouldn’t get back up again. But we were left behind while the rest of the men and women retreated. The bulk of the soldiers were a good ways back. They were off the bridge and still fighting the horde, though it was much smaller now. The fight had turned and the soldiers were kicking major zombie ass. Shouting violent insults as they killed them off.
Fillips ran out of bullets. She moved to her communication gear on her shoulder but it was busted, which was probably why we didn’t hear the orders to fall back. “Shit.” She picked up an abandoned handgun from the ground and started blasting the otherwise slower, dumber zombies that had fallen behind the rest to eat the leftovers. I just watched her.
“You should go,” she said without looking at me. “Go back to the Bastion and be with your kids. You’re all they have left.”
“Fillips…”
“Raina,” she interrupted. “Don’t take this the wrong way. I’m glad you came out in the daytime because you thought I was in trouble. I was. I’d probably be dead right now if you hadn’t come, but we got this.”
“I—don’t think you do.” I tapped her shoulder and pointed across the bridge. Another horde of undead were coming over The Narrows, steaming from the sun burning their flesh.
“Holy mother of God! Get the hell out of here, Raina, we all need to get the hell out of here!” She screamed and then she ran toward her fellow soldiers. I didn’t leave. I followed her. With her communication down, they didn’t have a clue what was coming at them. “FALL BACK!” she screamed as she ran. “MORE ARE COMING, FALL BACK!”
Only twenty or so men and women stood, armed to the teeth as we came off the bridge.
“Fillips?” a tall man with black stars on this shoulders said. He was dark and looked near his fifties, but it was a good strong fifty. There were gray hairs and wrinkles but there was also a straight back, strong muscles and a sharp mind. The name on his uniform said Kingston. He was the general in charge, he had to be.
“There’s more coming, just as many as before,” Fillips said between heavy breathing.
“We can’t abandon this bridge. If we do the city is lost.”
“Can we blow it up?” asked an officer standing by.
“We can, we’ll need some explosives,” Kingston said.
“We don’t have any on hand. I’ll radio some in,” the soldier offered.
“We don’t have enough time. We don’t have enough soldiers,” Kingston said. He was rubbing the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, thinking hard. How was he going to win this?
“I can help,” I said quietly. I was unsure of myself. They were all human and I wasn’t. What if they saw me as just as much of a threat as the zombies. Sure I was here to help, obviously. But in my experience that doesn’t always stop bigotry and fear. We needn’t look farther than last night for a shining example of that…
“Raina,” Fillips said, and there was a warning in her voice. Maybe she was just as uncertain of their reaction to me as I was. “I told you to leave.”
“Let her talk,” Kingston said. “All ideas are welcome, but you have about five seconds before we’re over run, so talk fast.”
“I’m a vampire. I can make fire, a lot of fire,” I said fast.
“How are you outside?”
“I’m—a demigod, too. The sun won’t kill me. It just burns like hell.”
“Holy Fuck,” said one of the soldiers.
The zombies were within a couple hundred feet now, and the few soldiers left took aim and began making a weak dent in the mass of undead.
“Do it,” Kingston said as he brought his own weapon up and began shooting. “We got your back.”
I stepped forward and Fillips put a hand on my shoulder. “Are you sure about this?”
I didn’t look back at her. I said, “No.” But I kept walking. I took off the black hood and let my hair flow freely in the sudden high winds. I took off my boots and let the coat fall to the snow and blood. “Goddess,” I breathed in pain. My skin was steaming, burning in the cloudy overcast. Still I walked head on toward the horde.
Bullets whizzed by me. I was just a few dozen feet away from the zombies when I planted my feet on the snow with a wide stance and called my flame. Like a fever it boiled inside me, growing hotter and hotter until my mind was a blur of pain, both from the sun and from within me. I screamed through clenched teeth, but when the fire finally came through my skin, eating the dress off my body and leaving me naked, the pain was minimal, close to gone. I actually chucked a little bit. My fire negated the sun? After all, how can a vampire already on fire burn to death in the sun?
I pushed the fire out like a blowtorch roaring from my body in all directions. I thought this was going to be a lot harder. It wasn’t. I was a human torch and I felt fully confident in my flame as I strode into the mass, killing everything that came within ten feet or more. They couldn’t touch me, but they wanted to. So dumb. I was like a poisoned worm on a hook. I felt powerful. Bad ass even…But that didn’t last long. A little thing, a young girl. She was a zombie alright, but she wasn’t as rotten as the others. Her eyes were milked over, there was a wound on her arm, her skin looked off, but she was still a little girl. She looked maybe four years old. My heart said save her. My arms even moved out on their own, as if I was going to hold her. She walked toward me and burned up instantly, ashes only.
I closed my eyes and breathed deep. When I opened them I was alone on that bridge. The zombies were dead all of them. Those that didn’t burn were shot. Maybe Raphael was right. Killing them wasn’t the answer. I felt sick.
“Wow, girl,” Kingston said as he and the others approached me. “They’re all dead. Holster the weapon.”
I let the fire die down and again I felt the heat of the sun burning my skin. Fillips handed me Alistair’s coat and hat. Another officer helped me get my feet into the boots.
“Thank you,” said Fillips. “You should get home. The city is safe for now.” I nodded. I felt dirty and I wanted nothing more than to hold my kids.
“Hold on, we can use a woman of your skills,” said Kingston. There’s a lot of zombies out there. You could really clean house.”
“Killing them all isn’t the answer,” I said quietly. “Not when there’s a cure.”
“Are you talking about the crack-pot doctor’s proposal? Turning them into vampires? Even if that was a viable opti
on, we don’t have the time to manufacture that kind of cure or the means to execute it. I’m sorry. If you aren’t going to help us any further then Fillips is right, you should get home.”
So I left…
When I came home I threw away Alistair’s soiled clothes that I borrowed. I showered and changed back into the black shirt and green wrap skirt I’d worn Saturday. Then I held onto my children and enjoyed there company. But as the hours ticked by we began to feel like prisoners in Alistair’s room. Outside the palace the snow fell, the sun shined, and men fought zombies. Inside the palace people were giving in to fear. They fought over everything and anything. Bitterness, panic, grief and anger were brewing a dangerous cocktail of human depravation that I would not expose my children to. Bastion Fatal’s guards were doing the best they could to keep unruly folk in line, but they couldn’t be everywhere all of the time, and people were taking advantage. When Alistair woke close to nightfall, I didn’t tell him about my little day trip outside. No need dredging up the pain of it, or hearing about how reckless I’d been. I did, however, warn him about what was happening outside his room.
“I’ve been reading some of their minds from here, Alistair. There’s a man, I don’t know his name, but I heard his thoughts. He wants to take over the palace by killing all the vampires in their sleep. He hates us. He blames us. And he’s not alone. There’s a lot of angry people out there…” Alistair stopped my words with a gentle finger to my mouth.
“I’ll deal with it.”
“How?” I asked as he took his finger back.
“I’ll ask Charley and Melvern to help me weed out the dangerous people. We’ll talk to them,” he said with a smile as he stood from his bed. “And if that doesn’t work—don’t worry about it.” He bent down and kissed me before taking some clothes from his wardrobe and heading to the bathroom to get dressed and brush his teeth.
“He’s going to kill them,” said Thomas, and he didn’t looked scared or disturbed by that idea at all. Strangely, neither was I. Alistair would deal with this problem.