The captain ruminated over that for a few seconds, then sighed. “Well, that’s no good. Renati was pretty far down on the food chain there.”
“Renati’s the one who looks like he stuck his finger in an electric socket, right?” Dax asked. “He made the zombies talk?”
I sighed. “It was one zombie. And I don’t think he made it do anything. It just…happened.”
Durkee adjusted his cap again, his expression unchanged. “Renati. I remember him well enough. Still. The entire research team is just gone?”
“As far as we know.”
“No one’s said anything about them?”
I shook my head. “Unless Dax heard something.”
Dax also shook his head.
Gloria retreated to her bed for a few seconds. She reached underneath it and came up with a fistful of small items wrapped in plastic. “Granola bars, anyone?”
Those of us who had been subsisting on pastrami snatched them immediately. I tore off the wrapper and jammed half the thing into my mouth. It had melted together at some point, and the actual chocolate chips were probably a little stale, but my God, it wasn’t pastrami. It wasn’t pastrami.
Tony and Dax tore into their snacks with similar gusto. Durkee watched us, something vaguely resembling a smile touching his face. “Pastrami,” he said. “I knew we had too much of it. The whole city’s living off it?”
“It’s not even good pastrami,” I said.
“Bet the Navy got the good stuff. Food-thieving pirates.”
We snacked for a moment, each of us lost in our own thoughts.
Predictably, it was Tony who brought up the undead elephant in the room. “So why are you in here? What’d you do?”
“He didn’t do anything,” Gloria said. “His underling was a maniac.”
“No,” Durkee said. “I mean, yes. He was…troubled. But I’m not blameless.”
I found it hard to believe this seemingly reasonable man could have done anything to warrant Keller tossing him into jail…but then again, maybe I was too used to Keller barking at me for perceived wrongdoings.
The captain lifted his gaze toward the ceiling for a few seconds, either collecting his thoughts or steeling himself for the conversation ahead. “When this all started—I mean, when it first became clear the dead were getting up—the R&D team became very aggressive in searching for a treatment. They were getting close to a vaccine, along with specialized antibiotics designed to combat bites and whatever was transmitted with them. We were under orders to continue working on them.”
“Orders,” Tony repeated. “From Franklin?”
“Yes, this was before they went dark. They were very interested in our progress.” He settled back against the wall, his gaze once again flickering up to the ceiling. “It was a rough drug. Lots of side effects. It worked in laboratory conditions—it sufficiently changed the virus—but it was rough on actual bits victims. They had run out of the injured and dying to test it on. So I asked for volunteers.”
Samuels had talked about testing on living people once. I had seriously feared that Hammond intended to execute the man on the spot. I had never seen the general—well, he was a captain then—so angry.
Durkee must have seen the look on my face, for he smiled faintly. “I know. Bad idea anyway. A squadron came forward, but even then the suggestion did not sit well with some, including my second in command.” The smile faded. “Keller.”
Tony leaned away from him. “You tested it on your own men?”
“Volunteers,” Durkee said. “Men and women who wanted to end this as much as the rest of us. And the antibiotic Jacoby cooked up had already proven effective on dogs and cats…”
“You tested it on dogs and cats?” Dax squeaked.
Animal testing was bad and all that, but it was the unspoken meaning behind this information that scared me most: “Dogs and cats can be zombies?”
“So he says,” Gloria said. “I never saw any.”
“It jumped to animals at some point,” Durkee said, ignoring our stricken expressions. Undead animals. Zombified dogs. Holy shit, Evie had bitten plenty of ghouls since we’d caught her. She hadn’t turned, but…
“We don’t see many,” he clarified. “Maybe they’re better at evading bites. But that’s neither here nor there. It worked on them. We needed human trials, so the squad came forward.”
I figured this story didn’t end well. “It didn’t work, did it?”
“It didn’t work.” He let out a humorless snicker. “Oh, did it not work. They got sick and turned.” His voice dropped to nearly a whisper. “I don’t rightly know what they turned into, but it was…it was not what they had been. They didn’t talk. They didn’t make any noise at all. But they watched you. They were fast. They knew what you were going to do. There was intelligence left in there.”
Nothing in his description sounded like what I had seen in Alyssa. I couldn’t decide whether that made me feel worse or better about her prospects.
“R&D begged to study them. I let them do it. Figured if we stayed vigilant it would be fine.” His expression grew sheepish. “Mistake number three or four, if you’re keeping track. They broke out, overran the primary medical facility quickly…we locked down surviving staff, went in there to fight them off…they did not make it easy. I must have lost hundreds of good soldiers.”
There had never been any peep of this from the radio, as far as I knew. A story this gruesome wouldn’t have stayed with the top brass. Someone would have leaked Massacre in Hastings all over camp.
The captain rested his hands atop his knees. “I…we fought for three days. Eventually we managed to round up the remaining…changed…and corral them. But they escaped. I don’t know how. Or why. Maybe someone helped them. Maybe they did it themselves. But they just disappeared. Near as I can figure, they reached the quarantined part of the city. I wasn’t about to send more men after them, not into that hornet’s nest. So we sealed off as many entrances to that side of town as we could, put up fencing, and doubled our strength at the perimeter.”
Where had Renati been in all this? I cleared my throat. “And your research team?”
“Most of them died in the initial fighting. It seems they all turned at once. Jacoby had been off-duty…he hanged himself. Found him dangling from a noose in my office.” Durkee looked down. “He tried to eat me. You can guess what happened after that. Whatever you gave to your sick…that was likely something Jacoby cooked up. And if that’s the case, he probably tinkered with it to ensure it would alter the virus as well.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. Clearly I should have stuck to fighting. Helping the living is entirely too fraught with peril.
“Don’t,” Durkee said. “Don’t beat yourself up too much. Renati may well have thought giving them that was preferable to doing nothing. He probably thought if they did die, at least they wouldn’t come back. Can’t say I don’t understand the feeling. There is nothing worse than doing, well, nothing.”
That had been my logic when I gave out a drug that turned people into self-aware revenants. Man, if I ever got another moment of peace, I was going to sit Renati down and find out what the hell his motives were.
Tony and Dax were staring at him, their expressions a mixture of horror and astonishment. Gloria and Jay had clearly heard at least part of the story before, but their attention remained fixed on the captain, waiting for the next bit of bad news. Durkee must have held back the segments about intelligent zombies when they were all first introduced.
I jammed the last of my granola bar into my mouth and chewed it as quietly as I could. Hey, you try eating nothing but pastrami for weeks and see if you can turn down some good old-fashioned sugar.
“After that, no one looked at me quite the same way.” Durkee sat up a little straighter. “I ordered what remained of the research team to stand down. To study the actual undead, rather than actively try to prevent anything. Lattimore was left in charge of actually trying to heal the sick. We had outb
reaks, people kept dying…” he paused, scratching the back of his neck. “I thought we could proceed along as normal. But we couldn’t. My men didn’t believe in me anymore. Maybe I didn’t believe in me. They got me in the middle of the night and threw me in here, and I’ve been twiddling my thumbs ever since.”
“By they you mean Keller,” Tony guessed.
“He was in charge of the coup, yes.” Durkee pushed his cap up again. “To this day I don’t know if I blame him. Maybe I’d have done the same thing, if I watched that happen to my squad mates. I assume you’ve been told I’m dead.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I heard there was some kind of breach and the undead ate you.”
“Reasonable. Keller can’t throw me in that arena—people would recognize me—and he’s still too afraid to actually kill me.” Durkee tapped his fingers against his knees. “I’ve heard gunfights. There are still breaches?”
“Frequently,” I said. “The soldiers come in to the medical facility in the mornings.”
“And it’ll keep happening. Hastings wasn’t designed to be cordoned off. No big city is. The dead always find a way through.”
Ain’t that the truth, I thought.
“Gloria tells me she heard a handful of transmissions from Hastings, but that Elderwood was concerned about us. The radio broke…right before I wound up in here. I was about to send another team out to the library before…this…all happened. I should have waited longer. Maybe the area would have cleared out more. At the time, everything on the east side of the fence was a crawling cesspit of the dead, even before the squad we experimented on got in there.”
Tony nodded. “We went and got the radio turned on. It was pretty empty, until the end. We got jumped by dead guys.”
“They sprang a trap,” I muttered. “Must’ve been your…um…team.”
Durkee shook his head and stared down at his hands. “You’re lucky you escaped. I don’t know what else those…those men…out there can do. And I don’t know how many undead are in that area of the city, not really. Survivors came pouring in from all entrances. I imagine those who wound up on the infected side were quickly taken themselves.”
How had all of this gone on without Elderwood knowing any of it? Had Durkee simply not reported it? Or had General Anderson, and later General Hammond, just listened to depressing reports alone, in the darkness of the radio room, and simply not told a soul about them?
“You got the radio on,” Gloria said. “Did you talk to anyone?”
“We asked Hammond to come save us.” Tony held up his hands, staving off the sudden grins on Gloria and Vijay’s faces. “Hold it. We don’t know if he can actually do anything. He’s in kind of a shit storm himself. But he knows we’re here.”
Durkee sighed, then tipped his head to rest it against the wall.
“So what do we do?” Dax asked.
Durkee pulled his blanket up over his shoulders. “Not much we can do, son. There’s not any escape routes out of here. Frankly, from what you’ve all described about what’s going on out there, this cell might be the safest place for the time being. So I suggest you eat something besides pastrami, get some rest, and maybe we can all play a nice game of charades in the morning.”
Charades.
The dead were talking, we were all in prison, and he wanted to play charades?
Oooh, I know! You’re Death, standing over us!
My stomach made an ominous sound, and a familiar pain twisted its way through my gut. Not emotional this time—no, this was more of the sort of severe displeasure that happens when you introduce any other sort of food, namely pure sugar, to a diet that has been comprised largely of fake pastrami.
There had to be a way out of there. There had to be a way to get Hammond to come get us.
What’s he going to do? Throw his survivors at a wall of soldiers? And a battle will just attract the dead from the other side. We’ll be fucked even if he does come.
“What’s going to happen to us?” I asked in a small voice.
Gloria shrugged. “I’ve been asking the guards that since they locked us up. No one says anything. Keller asked me some questions the first day in here, but he hasn’t come back. Maybe he forgot about us.”
Or he was too busy sussing out whether Hammond was actually going to send a fighting force out after the so-called Commander McKnight. That had probably kept him occupied for a good while.
“Really,” Durkee said, his gaze flickering over all of us. “Get some rest. It’s the only way to make time pass in here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Shuffling dead soldier?”
Dax lay a square of paper with a stick figure holding a surprisingly well-drawn rifle scrawled on it in front of Gloria. “Here.”
She studied her own squares, which no doubt contained similarly imaginative drawings. “Um…bloodied carcass?”
“Go fish.” Dax paused. “I mean, go shamble.”
The background was simple enough. Before Gloria and Jay joined him, Captain Durkee spent a lot of time in solitary with just a pack of markers and a deck of notecards. Rather than slit his wrists with the paper stock, he created the world’s first game of Go Shamble.
And now he finally had people to play it with.
I guess prison really does change a man.
I didn’t join in. Instead, I lay on my cot and pulled a scratchy blanket over my head, trying to slip back into the dream I’d just had. I had been back at my parents’ house, in my old room. Dad had redecorated it in a vague effort to turn it into an office, so it must have been after college. Mom kept calling me, telling me breakfast was on. The smell of coffee—good stuff, not the sludge I’d been drinking—filled the house.
If I kept my eyes shut, if I could just get back to that point…
“Glasses zombie?” Jay asked.
“Those aren’t glasses, those are goggles,” Durkee said. “He’s a scientist.”
Jay sighed. “Goggles zombie?”
“Go shamble.”
There was no going home. Not in real life and not in my dreams. I was still trapped here in Hastings with a deposed military commander, an ex-coworker, and Gloria fucking Fey, and I had unwittingly participated in killing a good person and then bringing her back as a talking revenant.
This sucks, I thought.
“Hey.”
Tony must have been standing right next to me. I peeked out from under the blankets, one eyebrow arched.
“You know you’re not very good at that,” he said. He was indeed looking down at me, vague concern splashed across his face. “Both your brows go up.”
“Your mom,” I said, because I apparently regress to the insult level of a twelve-year-old when I’m upset.
“That’s not even remotely—”
“Tony, please.” I shut my eyes, hoping he’d go away. “I can’t nap with you staring at me and them playing that thing.”
Instead, he sat down next to my bed. I felt his back pressing against the edge of the cot, and when I opened my eyes again the outline of his jacket was right there in front of me.
So much for solitude.
“We’ll get out of here,” he said. “We’ve been through worse.”
He really did pick the most inappropriate moments to be comforting.
“We’re going to rot here,” I said. “Or the city will eventually get overrun and we’ll be eaten.”
“No.”
“Yeah.”
He shifted around a little bit to look at me. “Hammond will come after us.”
“Hammond is not going to waste firepower to extract three people who aren’t really that important.”
“He’s a softie.”
“You’re a softie.”
He chuckled. “You know what? Ezekiel dealt with worse than this.”
“Ezekiel is a Mennonite superhero. We are sadly normal.” My stomach made another gurgling noise, and this time I couldn’t quite tell what it was upset about. “Ezekiel is also fictional.”
Now they were back.
The soldiers scanned the room, then pointed at me. “Medic. Come on.”
“Why do you need her?” Tony demanded. He sprung to his feet pretty fast, considering that leg injury that seemed to dog him.
One of them came toward me, his boots clomping noisily over the polished floor. “The outbreak’s getting worse. We need all medical personnel on duty. Even traitors.”
Oh, so now I was a traitor. That was lovely.
The soldier stared down at me. “Get up.”
I bit back my initial response, which was to tell them to tell Lattimore, Renati, and the entire medical staff to go straight to hell.
Maybe he could read the sentiment in my expression. He reached down, seized my arm, and yanked me right out of bed. I yelped, my shoulder making a popping sound as it strained.
“You’re not in a position to be refusing anything,” he informed me. “We need all medical staff present.”
Get sent to jail, go die in a plague. That sounded about right.
“Private,” Durkee said from his spot on the floor. “Don’t be rude to the lady.”
The soldier stared at him for a moment. His face betrayed no emotion, but I imagined him struggling somewhat—the ingrained effort to obey a longtime commander warring with the desire to tell him where to stick it.
The latter feeling won. “Shut your pie hole, prisoner.”
Durkee rolled his eyes and then looked back down at his cards. “Pie hole? Really?”
The soldier shoved me in front of him and began pushing me toward the door. My foot got tangled in a blanket left on the ground, and I nearly tripped over it, held up only by his grip around my bicep.
He yanked me again. “Stop dawdling.”
Hammond would never be okay with this level of assholery.
Should have stayed in Elderwood.
I heard Tony’s footsteps clattering after me. “Hey. Hey, you fucker, c’mere!”
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