The Hungry 4: Rise of the Triad (The Sheriff Penny Miller Series)

by Steven Booth

  “That’s kind of sweet,” she said, after a time.

  “I’m serious. It’s a death sentence.” Scratch shrugged. “But hell, so is not finding a cure, one way or another.”

  Miller said, “I don’t copy that.”

  Scratch squatted down to face her. “If we help Karl, I get everything I want. You and me, some time together. Plus, I get you with a side order of maybe saving the world. So the way I see it, that’s not such a bad deal, gal. In fact, this is a win-win situation, as far as I can tell.”

  Miller snorted. “You don’t really believe that romantic line of horse apples, do you?”

  Scratch stood up again but held her gaze. “Yes, I do.”

  Miller shuffled a bit closer to Scratch, but not close enough for him reach out and touch her. She lowered her voice. “I don’t know. My gut feeling is to run. Something in Karl’s eyes tells me that there’s something else going on here and not just an honest search for a cure. Hell, something always is, far as I can see. I just don’t know what yet.”

  “Why don’t you stop thinking about Ol’ Karl and start thinking about me,” Scratch said. He grinned. “He ain’t your type anyway—or, more to the point, you ain’t his.”

  Scratch slid close to Miller. He kissed her on the forehead. She was still wearing the Serenity Center scrubs. He pulled at the hem of her shirt. The air grew thick with his lust. Miller considered protesting, but really, why should she bother? It wasn’t like she didn’t want to be with Scratch. She did. He was a good lover on most days and a great one on occasion. He was her best friend. He made her feel good and protected and safe. When she was in Scratch’s arms she could almost forget that a horde of slobbering zombies waited right outside their door. Sex with Scratch was nice. It was a good feeling, a good escape, and she needed that from time to time—come to think of it, right now being one of those times. It didn’t seem possible that it had been just that morning that the Serenity Center burned to the ground. Why the heck not?

  She helped him get her scrub shirt off. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. Scratch was never one to pass up an obvious opportunity, and he focused his attention on her breasts. As he kissed and caressed them, he eased her down on the mattress. The timing felt perfect, the kiss perfect. All was well with the world for a change.

  As he pulled off his own scrub shirt, Miller said, “You know, I have to admit I’m kind of impressed.”

  “I know, my abs are flat out sick.” Scratch flexed his muscles, making his tattoos ripple. “But thanks for noticing.” He began to pull down his pants. His soldier was already at attention.

  “No, not that,” Miller chuckled. “I just think it’s kind of cool and interesting that you don’t mind the audience.”

  Scratch halted. “Back up. What audience?”

  “You didn’t know they were watching us?”

  “W-w-watching?”

  “That’s two way glass, cowboy,” Miller said, nodding to the huge picture mirror behind Scratch. “Hi Karl.” And then she waved and squinted. “Hey, Scratch, I think I can just see the lights on their recording equipment.”

  “Recording equipment?” Scratch said. “Wait a damned minute. I didn’t sign up to do government-sponsored pornos. That lying motherfucker tricked me!”

  “Tricked you? How?”

  “He said…” Scratch hesitated.

  “He said what?” Miller demanded. She sat up, covering her breasts.

  Scratch reddened. “He said that we could speed up the experiment if we… you know.”

  “What? Had sex on camera?”

  “Well, he didn’t tell me about the cameras. He said…” Scratch seemed ready to blurt it out, but hesitated again. “He said that the effects of the super juice might wear off quicker and safer if you, you know, had orgasms. A lot of them.”

  “And you told him you were just the man for the job, right?” Miller didn’t know whether to laugh at Scratch’s gullibility, or go punch out Sheppard’s headlights. “Somehow he neglected to mention recording each and every time we got it on in here.”

  “Yeah.” Both Scratch and his still visible enthusiasm had begun to wilt. He turned to the mirror and raised his middle finger. “Don’t think I’m going to forget this, motherfucker!”

  “I’m surprised to find you so danged modest. You always struck me as a bit of an exhibitionist.”

  “Doin’ it outdoors ain’t the same thing, Penny.” He took her by the arm and pulled her away from the mirror. Then he gave her the scrub top again. “Get dressed. We can’t do this. Not in broad daylight. Well, not in front of them. I can’t, anyway.”

  “I thought you bikers didn’t care about things like that,” Miller said, tweaking him for all it was worth. And it was worth a ton at the moment. She almost laughed out loud.

  Scratch scowled. “I’d rather face a zombie football team on the two yard line.”

  “Oh.” Miller looked at him for a long moment. She fought down a smile. “Well, so much for saving the world, I guess.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CRYSTAL PALACE

  After they had freshened up a bit, Sheppard brought Miller, Scratch, and Alex to what appeared to be completely innocent exam rooms. Sheppard was careful to be courteous and appropriate at all times. The room he put Miller in reminded her of her gynecologist’s office back in Flat Rock. She wondered if it was still there. Probably, she thought. Hell, all of Flat Rock should be there, except the parts that burned down in the first days of the apocalypse. Just no live people. Miller felt a flicker of homesickness run through her chest.

  When Sheppard came back into the room, he was wearing a fairly standard medical uniform, complete with white coat. He put on some gloves and a mask.

  “I’m not putting my feet in the stirrups, if that’s what you’re planning.”

  “No problem,” Sheppard laughed. “I’m just going to draw some blood.”

  Miller hesitated. “You’re going to draw the blood? Don’t you have, like, an army of minions to do mundane shit like that?”

  “I thought we might have a chance to sit and talk. Besides, I think I still remember how to draw blood without help.”

  “Suit yourself, Captain.”

  He waved her to one of the stools in the exam room. “Have a seat.”

  Miller sat. Sheppard wrapped a rubber band around her upper arm and asked her to make a fist. Once he was able to find the vein he was looking for, he expertly stabbed it with a needle and attached the first of several collection tubes to the needle. Miller looked away. She had seen a lot of blood in her time, but seeing her own filling a clear tube had never been a welcome experience.

  “So, how have you been?” asked Sheppard, almost casually. “You have been through more than any normal human could be expected to handle and yet you still look great.”

  “How have I been?” Miller repeated. “Well, let’s see. I’ve been starving, scared to death, on the run. You know the same old, same old.”

  Sheppard laughed, but the sound came out hollow. “I love how you manage to keep your spirits up, Penny. You’ve clearly been blessed with a great sense of humor.”

  “Yeah, I start touring nightclubs in New Jersey as soon as I finish saving the world.” She smiled thinly. Sheppard chuckled.

  Miller waited until Sheppard looked up at her. “You want to explain the happy horseshit you fed to Scratch about being my own personal vibrator?”

  “I’m sorry.” He looked down at her arm again, refusing to make eye contact. “It was something we were curious about. There’s a good chance that the release of endorphins during orgasm could speed the dissipation of the accelerant in your system.”

  She snorted. “Nice. But wouldn’t I need to still be juiced for that?”

  “The fact is, the accelerant isn’t clearing from your blood as quickly as we would like. That led us to theorize that there are degrees of being accelerated. We wanted to test that out.”

  “And you couldn’t ask me?”

&nbs
p; “I couldn’t be certain you wouldn’t interpret that as being asked to be raped repeatedly for science. It was a non-starter if you didn’t go for it. I was being cautious.”

  “Next time, ask,” Miller ordered. “It’s my body and my life.”

  “Of course,” Sheppard said. “By the way, I took a look at the films of your cranial scan, and I wanted to tell you that there’s nothing to worry about. There is no tumor.”

  Miller huffed. “So that was one more lie from Dr. Bullshit. Kind of makes you wonder what else Rubenstein’s been lying about—perhaps more importantly, what he’s actually told the truth about.” She looked long and hard at Sheppard. “There’s something I don’t get, Karl. You’re a stand-up guy. You’ve always tried to do the right thing. How can you stomach that lying sack of shit? Please tell me you don’t actually trust him.”

  “Trust might be too strong a word. Dr. Rubenstein does have some good points, Penny.”

  “Name a few.”

  Sheppard considered for a moment. “He’s loyal, he does what he’s told, he does it well, and he produces results.”

  “That is almost the same thing as telling me that he has no ethics or morals. That he’s willing to follow orders at all costs. That he is a good Nazi. Wow, what an asset.” Miller watched as Sheppard filled more of the little vials. “How much are you planning on draining me for, Count Dracula?”

  “Just a few more, I promise.” Sheppard continued working, but didn’t meet her eyes. “I am really sorry about Terrill Lee, Penny. More than you’ll likely ever know. And I feel bad that things have gone so poorly for you and Scratch. I’m very glad that we found you when we did, though. Believe me, I spent a good deal of my time the last few months just looking for you. You sure know how to stay off the grid when you want.”

  “What can I say? I’m talented that way.” Miller smiled. Sheppard smiled back, but it was pretty clear he wasn’t comfortable. “Of course you were just concerned with our well being, right? It wasn’t because you wanted to continue experimenting on us—on me—right?”

  Now Sheppard did meet her eyes. “How am I supposed to answer that, Penny? You know I have always had your best interest at heart. But at the same time, I’ve always been focused on finding a cure for the zombie virus. As we both know, I was involved in the creation of it, and that fact has haunted me ever since. I have to find a solution.”

  “Come on, Karl. We both know that’s not the whole truth. I remember the story you told. If that poor motherfucker you were conducting super soldier experiments on hadn’t up and died and then bit your friend Luke Taylor—in that order—we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. You’d be a Sergeant fucking around with condemned prisoners and volunteers, and I’d be the Sheriff of sleepy little Flat Rock.”

  “I’m not following you, Penny.”

  “You work to project a persona of always having been focused on the cure.”

  “I have.”

  “You know as well as I do that you were one of the principal creators of the disease, intentionally or not. So how can you say your focus has always been on a cure when your real intention was to make super soldiers?”

  “Penny, how many times are we going to have this conversation?” Sheppard asked, as he inserted another one of the vials onto the needle. “We were trying to save lives, not destroy them. Can you imagine how much safer the battlefield would be with accelerated soldiers—our soldiers—fighting for our country? We always planned to use only highly paid volunteers. It had been a good idea when we conceived of it, and it was working up to a point. But you’re smart enough to know that molecular biochemistry can be as much of an art as a science. We experienced an unanticipated and unfortunate side effect, and the virus got out of containment before we could control it. If Luke hadn’t panicked, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved. It’s a tragedy of historical proportions, and I feel the weight of it every day.” He looked at her with sad, brown eyes that seemed sincere. “And you know all that, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I know all that. I just wanted to see if you were going to stick to the same story as before, now that things were going your way again.”

  “Nothing’s changed,” Sheppard said as he removed the needle from Miller’s arm. He placed a small ball of cotton on her inner elbow, and bent her arm to place pressure on it. She took it from him and continued on her own. Sheppard said, “I’ve made a terrible mistake. My goal—and the goal of this entire facility—is to either reverse the effects of the zombie virus, or to create a vaccine to prevent it from wreaking further havoc.”

  “Last time I checked, Karl, the effect of the virus is a horrible, everlasting undead existence. How do you plan to reverse that part of it?”

  Sheppard went to the counter. He placed each of the vials of blood in a little rack, and carefully, obsessively turned the labels so that they faced the same direction. “It’s hard to explain.”

  Miller stood up, holding the cotton ball against her arm. “Try me.”

  “Well, as it turns out the zombies aren’t as dead as you might think.”

  Miller’s jaw dropped. She struggled for balance. “They’re what?”

  “This shouldn’t be that much of a shock, Penny. You know that the mitochondria stay active in an infected individual, even after their internal organs shut down, and produce power anaerobically more or less continuously. And even though much of the subject’s tissues experience necrosis, the nervous system and the muscles maintain viability. The body dies, but the brain effectively lives on. True death doesn’t come to an infected individual until a catastrophic failure of the physical structure of the central nervous system causes permanent incapacitation. Does all of that make any sense?”

  Miller frowned. “What you’re saying is, until we shoot them in the brain, the zombies are really alive but just trapped in a dying body?”

  Sheppard nodded. “You always were very quick on the uptake.”

  Miller sat down heavily. The horror of what he was saying hit her all at once. “That sounds absolutely hideous, God damn it. Can you imagine what it must be like? The empty terror they experience? The insatiable hunger they must feel?”

  “Penny,” began Sheppard with a warning tone. “Stay calm.”

  “Dear Jesus, are you telling me that that’s what Terrill Lee went through? My God, no wonder he hesitated before he bit me. He was still in there. Oh, my God!” Miller put her hand up to her mouth and bit down painfully. Her entire body trembled from a burst of empathy and grief. All of those walking corpses, still human in some basic way, tortured by rage and hunger and perhaps even partially aware of their own savagery. The idea it made Miller’s already tender psyche feel close to overload.

  “Sweet Jesus, Karl.” She had been feeling the monsters in a subconscious way for a week or more, due to the peculiar mix of viruses in her own system. She wasn’t going crazy, she was identifying with them. She was part zombie now.

  “Do you understand why we absolutely must find a cure? This has to stop.” Sheppard sat down next to her. He touched her shoulder. Miller felt her eyes fill at the gesture of human kindness. Those poor people…

  “Yes,” she said aloud. “A cure.”

  “A full cure, or at least an effective vaccine. Once I realized the truth, I spread the word through the scientific community. We asked for volunteers. Hundreds of us immediately committed ourselves to finding a way to stop this thing before anyone else has to suffer that fate. Even if we die trying. This has become my mission in life. I helped to create this disaster, and I feel compelled to find a way to end it once and for all.”

  “Karl?” Miller looked up sharply at Sheppard. “You said earlier that you had some zombies on base, right?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “No buts. I want to see one.”

  Sheppard looked at the floor. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Now.”

  “Penny, why do you want to do that?”

  “I
f you want my cooperation, Karl, you’ll show me one of your ‘subjects.’”

  Without answering, Sheppard got up. He grabbed the samples, went to the door and opened it. A nurse who happened to be walking by took the rack of blood-filled vials from him as smoothly as if it had been choreographed.

  Sheppard turned to Miller. “All right. I’ll take you. But if I do, I want your commitment to stay here and fully participate in our efforts to stop this unholy virus.”

  Miller thought about that for a moment. “I already gave you a quart of blood. I think I've been pretty damned cooperative already. You'll show me because I asked you to, not as some new kind of bargaining chip.”

  Sheppard stared at her. He had clearly been hoping for a different answer. Eventually he nodded. He pulled off the gloves and mask, and led the way out of the exam area. “Follow me.”

  Something immense was about to happen, Miller could sense it the change in the air. Time seemed to slow down. They walked on. Miller heard her heart pounding in her ears. Her anxiety returned full force but she successfully hid it from Sheppard. She just followed his lead as they moved briskly through the immense structure. Sheppard answered an occasional salute from a subordinate, but otherwise stared straight ahead. As Miller walked behind him, she began to wonder if she should have asked to have Scratch accompany her, but realized it wouldn’t matter. She would just fill him in later. They both knew the zombies had begun to operate in triads, to move and almost think as one. Now Sheppard was telling her something that made their fate even more nightmarish than before. Miller didn’t want to have to wonder about that part of it. She had to know.

  “How far is it?” Miller said. She hated herself for breaking the silence.

  Sheppard did not answer. They took the elevator down, dropping even deeper into the underground facility.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN