Hammond pinched the bridge of his nose. “They took some bad hits, but they were hanging in there. Communications were sporadic already; now it’s generally believed the city is gone. The last thing we heard from the relay station was that hundreds of thousands of revenants converged on what remained of the survivors, and once that happened…”
Most of us could put the rest of the story together on our own.
“LA’s kind of a hellhole, anyway,” I said, shoving the blanket at Tony. “A few zombies might be an improvement. Hold this, will you?”
He obediently held it up, providing something of a shield while I picked up my shirt and pulled it over my head. I glanced up fast enough to catch him peeking over the top.
“Jesus,” Dax muttered, staring at the floor. I figured he was referring to LA falling, not Tony trying to get a look.
“Anyway.” The general relaxed slightly once I was fully dressed. “I sent out five hundred soldiers last night to deal with whatever’s happening at the pit. McKnight will stop by them on his way to Hastings to let them know about the radio silence.”
“I will?”
“It’s on your way.” Hammond seemed to be bracing himself for an argument. “Unless you’ve got a problem with it?”
“What about the roving biker gangs?” I blurted out. “Gloria Fey was just talking about them…”
Hammond let out a long-suffering sigh. “That woman…”
“Hey,” Augusta said, “Gloria keeps us informed.”
“Her information is often out of context and all she’s doing in some cases is stirring up panic,” Hammond snapped. He turned to me with what I recognized as his I’m Talking to Frightened Civilians expression. “To answer your question, Vibeke, the brigand we captured swears up and down there’s no alliance—just separate groups trying to carve out their territories. I think one man will do better than a platoon. It’s easier for him to hide.”
“Yeah, but a platoon has a ton of machine guns,” I said.
The general’s mouth twitched up into a smile. “Your boy can take care of himself.”
“That I can.” Tony attempted to slide an arm around me, which I artfully dodged. “Your concern is touching, Vibby dearest.”
Augusta’s hand snaked out, tapped along the storage unit that served as a bedstand, and picked up her wristwatch. She squinted at it in the glow of the lamp, sighed, and put it back down. “I might as well get up. I’m on duty in an hour.”
“You’ve been reassigned,” the general said. “Everyone has. I need you at the west gate—we’ve got company.”
My head snapped up. “What’s at the west gate?’
“Leprechauns,” Tony said. “What the hell do you think?”
I glanced over at my cot. The muzzle of the antique assault rifle I’d adopted poked out from underneath, and the sight of it reassured me slightly. Tony and Hammond had seen to it that I practiced with it, and I’d developed into a halfway decent shot. “Should I go?”
“No,” Hammond said firmly. “We had some newbs come in late last night—the revenants were probably following them—and they need treatment. You go in to work, just like always.” The general tried for a reassuring smile, but he just looked pained. Then again, most authority figures tended to get that expression when Tony was around; my former editor had worn it quite often. “It’s just an influx. We’ll pick them off within the hour.”
I didn’t like the idea of stitching up zombie bites while actual zombies were banging at the damn door, but the general hadn’t led us wrong in the few weeks we’d been at Elderwood. “Okay,” I said, reaching for my pistol holster and the motorcycle jacket I’d picked up in Astra. “I’ll head up there.”
“Dax’ll walk you back while I’m gone,” Tony said. “Won’t you, Dax?”
Dax was still staring at the tent floor.
Tony gave him a shove. “Dax!”
Dax jumped about a foot in the air, then looked in my direction with bleary, suddenly bloodshot eyes. “Yeah, I’ll walk you home. Six o’clock?”
I nodded. “Sounds great.”
I didn’t comment on his eyes. Mine often started watering in the bad air, too.
Nobody moved.
Augusta sighed. “I feel like I’m back in the damn dorms. Will y’all get the hell out of my tent?”
I zipped up my jacket once I got outside, but it didn’t do much good against the bitter cold of our early, possibly permanent winter. The meteors kicked up one hell of a cloud cover, and no one in the immediate vicinity had seen the sun since the universe turned Earth into a pincushion. I turned to say goodbye to Dax, but he’d already shuffled off toward Sector Twelve, where single male civilians over age eighteen lived.
“What’s his problem?” I asked, staring after him. Dax usually had a smile for everyone. It was generally refreshing…until it wasn’t.
“He’s probably grieving for the good people of Los Angeles.” Tony held out his arms and flapped them around a bit. “So do I get a hug or anything?”
I wrapped my arms around him. To his credit, he didn’t try to cop a feel. “Be careful out there,” I muttered into his jacket. “Hammond’s been bitching about those brigands for weeks.”
“I don’t fear biker gangs. Biker gangs fear me.” He sent me his best ladykiller smile, then sauntered after Hammond.
The man was either a legend in his own mind, or was damn good at acting like it. Oh, Tony. Please stay safe.
I turned around and headed to work. At least up at the medical center I could charge my phone—my useless phone, which still couldn’t find a network after all this time—and make a decent pot of coffee.
It’s weird, the things that stay the same after everything else has gone to hell. I still wanted my morning jolt of caffeine, even at the end of the world. As long as Elderwood had coffee supplies and working generators, I had my cup. It was almost normal…if I could forget, just for an instant, where I was and what had happened.
I plugged in my phone as the coffeemaker percolated softly in the background. I dialed my parents’ home number, just as I did every morning, on the off chance that the stars would align and something would go right for me.
No service, the phone said. It probably didn’t even search for a network anymore. If any towers were still standing, there likely wasn’t any electricity left to power them.
But I still tried every morning. When it didn’t work, I shoved thoughts of family and friends into a dark corner of my mind. It was the only way I could function.
I left the phone on while it charged, just in case.
I never spent a lot of time planning for the apocalypse. I figured if it happened, I’d be toast, and thus didn’t see a reason to learn how to fight the undead or negotiate with the military or ration food supplies. I’d faced a bitch of a daily commute for my job at Rock Weekly, and worried about things like gas prices going up, my insurance policy, and whether the Kardashians would finally just go away.
In one night, all those problems became very small.
I kind of hoped the Kardashians were still kicking.
***
If I’ve learned anything since the end of the world, it’s that things can always get worse.
It doesn’t matter if you’re on a converted military base surrounded by soldiers with big guns. Something will inevitably go wrong while you’re trying to suture a squirming moron’s wounds—which is really, really awkward when you only received a crash course in suturing, anyway—and he will not shut up, and right when you’re about to whack him with a sedative to get some peace, a zombie will come crashing in and everything will go to shit.
The patient screeched and threw himself under the bed, leaving me standing there with a needle full of sedative and a growling, festering undead soldier leering at me.
No, sedatives don’t work on the undead. We tried that early on.
“Kill it!” the patient whined.
Maybe this is why things went to hell in a handbasket—everyone e
xpected someone else to do the dirty work. I held the needle up in as menacing a fashion as I could manage. Maybe if I jammed it through her eye…no, that meant I’d have to get too close to her. I chanced a glance to the left, where I’d tucked my pistol next to my portable kit.
“Kill it!”
“Please remain calm.” I sounded like the GPS system on my phone. Turn left to avoid the undead. Rerouting. “Noise attracts them. Just shut up and stay still.”
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God…”
I’ve often wondered what God thinks of all this. I like to believe He didn’t have anything to do with the meteor shower and ensuing zombie bonanza. It’s just such an asshat move to pull on your supposedly beloved creations.
A scream ripped through the hallway. I hoped that meant someone had seen Private Undead.
She snarled at me, or tried to; only one side of her face worked. The other half had been thoroughly gnawed on, though her blood had long since congealed into a black blob on her cheek and most of her neck. One revenant had probably knocked her down in a fight, and its compatriots had quickly descended on her.
I figured she’d been dead about five days. Her boots hung in tatters around her feet, indicating she’d made quite a journey to be here.
Machine gun fire echoed dimly from another portion of the building. Ah, shit. That meant there were more of them.
There’s always more. Zombies like to congregate.
The dead soldier stretched her hands out for me and took a lurching step forward. I dove for my gun, knocking my little suturing tray out of the way in the process. It clattered to the ground, and the ghoul briefly switched her stare to all the shiny instruments scattered across the tiled floor.
I slammed the syringe down on the counter and picked up my pistol, managing to thumb the safety off on the second try.
“Shit!” the patient squeaked.
Private Undead heard the higher tone and started in his direction. The patient squeaked again and burrowed deeper under the bed, whimpering prayers and curses and all manner of other things I couldn’t identify. Private Undead decided he looked juicier than me and headed for him with alarming speed.
I squeezed the trigger as she dropped to her knees, and my shot bounced off the wall. The patient screamed and slapped at her stretching hands, and I had to line her back up in a hurry. “Get down!” I barked. The patient mustered his senses enough to curl into the fetal position.
Dammit, she’s a fast one. The undead aren’t particularly renowned for their speed, but every now and then an agile one turns up to throw a wrench into things.
“Shoot her!” the patient screeched.
“Chill out!” I got her in the head while she stretched for the wounded man, and he screamed again when she tumbled forward, landing right next to him. I checked the doorway to make sure others weren’t following, then hurried over to help him out from under the bed. “You can’t just freak out like that, it helps them find you,” I scolded, checking him for bites. The few sutures I’d managed to put in had torn out during his dive under the bed. “And you wrecked my stitches!”
“There was a fucking zombie in here!”
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to put in a decent stitch?” I hastily wrapped his arm in gauze. “You can’t freak when you see the undead. They’re usually pretty slow—”
“That wasn’t slow!”
“—so if you freeze up, there’s no excuse!” I picked up my phone from the counter and jammed it into a pocket.
“What are you doing? I thought I needed stitches—”
“And I need to see why we’ve got revenants running around the medical center.”
“You can’t leave me here!”
I grabbed the doorknob. “Just lock the door. You’ll be fine.”
The patient stared at me, his mouth open in a perfect O of terror. “But what about her?”
“She’ll stay down this time.” I stepped into the corridor, slamming the door behind me. If the dude was smart, he’d lock the door and stay quiet until the threat passed.
Unfortunately, smart and zombie apocalypse are not usually terms that go together. For every person that figures out how to shoot straight and keep their wits about them, there’s thirty more that melt down into a screaming panic. Tony was right; something about the undead just makes people stupid.
Bullets ricocheted a few doors down. I grabbed a passing nurse in blood-splattered scrubs. “How did they get in?”
“They opened the fucking back door.”
I stepped back, aghast. “What? How could they even do that?”
She shook off my hand. “Don’t know, don’t care. Someone says they’re coming from the burial pit.”
The nurse ran off, leaving me standing there with my pistol. We had ghouls coming through the back door? The medical staff went largely unarmed. Hell, only about five percent of the non-military Elderwood population packed any heat. Most of the civilians had showed up immediately after the meteor shower, when the government first stepped in. General Hammond had offered lessons in firearms, but they went largely ignored. Joe Shmoe off the street isn’t really equipped to deal with the end of civilization as we know it, much less rotting cannibals.
I headed for the back entrance. By the smell of things, there were zombies who needed my bullets in their skulls.
I swung around the corner and nearly plowed into a lean figure in a dusty leather jacket. A pistol muzzle pushed up against my jawline, then abruptly snapped aside.
Tony shook his head at me. “Wrong way, Vibby.”
I would have hugged him if there hadn’t been at least a dozen ghouls shambling along some forty feet behind him, with more spilling in through the back door. My mouth dropped open a little bit. “Holy fucking—”
“Shit’s hit the fan.” Tony grasped my upper arm and started dragging me back the way I’d come.
“Close the door!”
“Good idea. You want to fight your way through them to try it?” He gave me a jerk. “I don’t care how good your aim has gotten, you don’t have enough bullets in that pistol for all of them, and more are stacking up outside. And goddammit, I told you to check corners.”
“I thought you left for Hastings!” I stumbled along behind him, glancing over my shoulder at the rampaging dead things in the background. They were in the camp. They’d gotten into the camp.
“Shit got way out of hand at the pit. I came back here to warn Hammond, but he already had a situation.”
I looked back again. Some of them were pretty ripe, like they’d been rotting a few weeks. Skin hung in ropes from their arms and faces, except where chunks were missing entirely. The stench of ruined flesh and decaying tissues boiled on ahead of them. I still didn’t know which was worse—smelling them or seeing them. “Are they all from the pit? Those soldiers he sent earlier—”
“Lambs to the slaughter.” He forced me to quicken my pace. “We tried to clean it up too late. Really too fucking late.”
“The medical staff—”
“—should have embraced firearms.” Tony began running. “Come on.”
I kept looking over my shoulder, even after we turned another corner and left the budding carnage behind us. Screams rang out—what the hell about the undead makes people so eager to scream, anyway?—and sporadic gunfire erupted from further back. Someone had come in with a weapon. “Hammond’s sending soldiers, right?”
“Maybe. He’s trying to get the fence back up.”
I stopped moving. “What happened to the fence?”
Tony nearly yanked me off my feet. “Will you hurry up? Looks like our local biker gangs did a little sabotage. Keep moving, dammit.”
“Are they in the camp, too?” This was all happening too fast.
“Who do you think left the door open?” We reached the lobby-turned-triage center when the lights went out.
Well, this is most definitely not good.
Tony sucked in a breath. “Oh, shit.”
; “Are you kidding me?” I turned sharply, banging my hip into the front desk. “Ow!”
“Some idiot probably blew out the generator.” He quickly regained his bearings and dragged me toward the sliding double doors. Bright orange light radiated inward through the glass, which gave me a little bit of comfort. At least the outside lights were still on. “Some idiot always blows out the generator…”
We managed to wedge the sliding doors far enough apart to slip out. They hung open, and as I stepped outside into a wall of heat, I realized we weren’t being lit up by the outside lights. Nor was the haze in the air just the ash we’d all grown used to breathing.
Fully half of Elderwood Refugee Camp was ablaze.
Brilliant orange-red flames leaped from buildings to the tent cities that had sprung up around them, dousing the area in the same hellish glow I’d seen in Astra.
I almost dropped my gun. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Hammond sounded the alarm three hours ago,” Tony said. “Or tried to. Turns out the alarm sirens on this campus were just for show.” He managed a sharp, thin laugh. “What are the odds?”
My fingers tightened around the pistol. “This isn’t happening. The camp’s fenced off. We have walls…”
“We have shitty chain-link fence, and someone cut a bunch of fucking holes in the middle of it.” He tugged on me again, forcing me to follow him down the steps. “By the time Hammond’s soldiers realized the pit was a lost cause and came back, the place was overrun.”
A handful of soldiers raced past us, machine guns at the ready. “Yes, General,” one blabbed into a walkie-talkie, “they seem to be in Sector Five, too.”
“They’re in the medical facility,” Tony called after them.
The one in the lead stopped and swung around, staring at the building we’d just left. “McKnight says they’re in the medical facility,” he said. “Fresh?”
Tony’s fingers dug into my jacket as he said, “They’re from the damn pit.”
“Pit,” the soldier repeated. His radio crackled in response, though I couldn’t hear Hammond’s voice over the screams and gunshots assaulting my eardrums. “Right, we’ll go in.”
Death and Biker Gangs (Grave New World) Page 3