This was a logistical problem that, if I were still a normal human, might have given me pause. As an ETF assaulter, the tactical approach would have been to retrieve one of the rifles, approach the targets from behind, preferably with backup. I’d slip behind them — preferably catching them between changing mags — and order them to drop the weapons or suffer immediate death. Respecting my loud and commanding tone, they’d probably do as they were told. I’d arrest these assholes and sometime in the next year or so, I’d be on the witness stand detailing my arrest of the perpetrators. But I wasn’t Daniel Harmon going about my business anymore. The brain parasites made a quicker and more dangerous decision.
Without bothering to scoop up a weapon, I took the one on the left first, the prick with the nervous laugh. I leapt on his back and sank my teeth into the side of his neck. Wrapping my legs around his waist, I yanked his machine gun toward the other mercenary. The bullets ripped through his companion’s guts and he dropped.
The moment the gun clicked empty I ripped it from my target’s hands and yanked it under his chin hard. I jumped off him as he fell to the ground. Then I clubbed the killer with his own weapon. I might have clubbed him a few more times than was strictly necessary.
A moment of eerie silence passed as I searched the scene for another goon to kill. The road was so quiet and appeared so empty all of a sudden, it was the fulfillment of every apocalyptic fantasy. I felt like the last man on Earth … or the last thing on Earth, anyway.
Then, tentatively, people began to emerge from behind cars. They peeked out from behind trees. And they began to clap.
Covered in blood, I sank to my knees as the applause rose. I might have been a hero. Then, against my will, I bent to feed on the last man I’d felled.
The applause dropped away substantially after that.
Chapter 30
CHLOE
We stopped in a deserted alley a few blocks from Echidna Biosystems. The streets were full of burnt corpses and hungry zombies. Alphonse spoke to us so softly, I felt like we were in a movie where the submarine crew has to stay quiet so we wouldn’t be blown up by depth charges. “There’s an advance team waiting for us. What we know so far is that the infected are very sensitive to sound. We think we can draw a bunch of them away to give us time for what we need to do.”
Jerry raised his hand and Alphonse gave the LAV crewman a nod. “Why don’t we just get Follower 1 to unload on them, boss? The gunship worked well enough back on Lakeshore.”
“We’re in closer quarters here and the world is watching so we want to use stealth and guile. The politicians would call it nuance and diplomacy. Could be there are uninfected civilians still in the towers around the lab. Friendly fire is the worry. Truth be told, I don’t give a God’s honest shit about that right now, but we do want to complete the mission without pulling more zombies to us. Zombies are drawn to noise so we’re going to church mouse this situation until further notice. Keep your powder dry. Before this is over, I think we’ll have plenty of need for zombie hunting. Clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very well. The security team at the lab has set up a noisy diversion. When we get the all clear, we’ll back up to the front doors to unload. When that hatch opens, I need you folks to move quickly and quietly through the doors. No looking right nor left to take in the sights, no drama, no screaming, no talking and no lollygagging — ”
“What about our engine?” I asked. “They’re going to hear that.”
“Our contingency plans will be much louder.”
“How many epidemic victims are out there now?” Thomas asked.
“I didn’t have time to take a census, Dr. Dill, but the Echidna team says it looks like an episode of The Walking Dead out there, except these monsters can run. There was a theory that an outbreak like this should be over in a few minutes. The people in charge thought containment should be easy with minimal collateral damage.”
“Idiots, in other words,” Jerry added.
“Yeah, those are people in nice suits who’ve never seen war, never got dirty.”
“It’s never that neat, is it, boss?” Tom asked.
“Never, ever,” Alphonse said.
I couldn’t look the LAV commander in the eyes. I’d just watched him kill civilians as they ran screaming. That psychic wound would never heal. I don’t believe in letting anything go. I hold grudges and, no matter how high-minded the mission to save the world, I didn’t believe the ends could ever justify the means. Not then, anyway.
Then Alphonse broke more news, “Sorry, Doctor, we lost your guinea pig back at that roadblock.”
“You lost my prisoner?” Shelly said, a little too loud for anyone’s comfort. “How the hell did that happen?”
Thomas looked startled. “He was strapped to the side of the —”
Alphonse put a finger to his lips. “Sorry about that, Officer Priyat. I don’t know what happened or why, just like with the rest of my life. Can’t control everything, you know.”
“We need that test subject,” Thomas said petulantly.
“If you’d like to go look for him, be my guest, Dr. Dill.”
“Your test subject was why I came along,” Shelly said.
Thomas wasn’t in a mood to listen to complaints. “That and St. Michael’s Hospital was overrun.”
“Be that as it may,” Alphonse said, “given the volatility on the road out of town, I couldn’t very well stop to try to recapture the bastard. If you’d like to go find your man, I can drop you off on my return to the base in Port Credit, Constable Priyat. You people always get your man, right? That your motto?”
“That’s the RCMP’s deal. I just thump and arrest assholes.”
Tom and Jerry laughed but Alphonse remained grim. “Things have changed considerably. There’ll be no arresting assholes, or thumping, either. You shoot to kill now, yes?”
Priyat looked furious but kept her voice even. “I did. I do. I will. Nobody knows that better than me.”
“So? You want a ride back or — ”
“I’ll stay with you guys until I can hook back up with a police unit.”
“Fine by me.” Alphonse looked from face to face, studying us. His gaze fell on my boss. Thomas looked ill. “You okay, there, Doc?”
“Fine.”
“Fine, really fine? Or shit-your-pants fine?”
“Let’s just get out of this steel box. I’ll feel better once I’m back in my own office. Everything else is just logistics of transport. We need to get into Echidna. ”
“When we pull up, Tom and Jerry will guard the LAV and ensure you make it inside the building. The advance team’s waiting for us. They’ll do the unloading of the supplies. Everybody clear?”
Dr. Rigg looked up from his phone for the first time in a long while. In the long shadows cast by the pale glow of its screen, he looked like a ghost. He cleared his throat. “I just want to say, thank you all for your sacrifice here today. It is a tribute — ”
Alphonse cut him off. “J'm’en calice! Let’s see if we can just get through the next few minutes without anybody making a sacrifice, okay?”
Tom and Jerry chorused, “Yessir!”
The rest of us stayed silent.
“Cheer up!” Alphonse said. “If not for the zombie apocalypse, you’d all be swilling back some Starbucks choco-latte nonsense, Tom and Jerry would be drinkin’ beers and I’d be chewing poutine. That shit’s not good for you. This isn’t the day you had planned, but what you planned was boring. One thing about gettin’ in the shit, you learn a lot about yourself. Gettin’ in the shit clears your head so you’re new and improved when you get back to clean. So? How about it? Everyone pumped and ready for the next stage of the adventure?”
We stayed quiet. I don’t know if he was making a joke, trying to rattle us or boost our morale. I knew I hated him and, no, I was not ready for “the next stage of the adventure.”
I suspected he was right, though. The world had changed. What I wasn’t pre
pared for was how much I was going to change when I got “back to clean.”
EPISODE 4
science (noun)
Systematic studies in pursuit of more accurate knowledge; the quest to illuminate the darkness of ignorance, often performed poorly and to a limited audience.
~ Notes from NEXT
Chapter 31
DANIEL
Along Lakeshore Boulevard, children cried. People shouted at me in anger. I ate like a dog, tearing and chewing. I kept a wary eye, making sure they didn’t come closer to my meal. Most people hurried away, no doubt worried I’d turn on them next or that they’d catch my disease. However, three large men emerged from a white van stuck in the traffic jam two lanes over. They each carried a two-by-four in their hands. Their beards were so thick and dark, I wondered if they were brothers, lost lumberjacks or a trio of hipsters whose D&D club included cosplay.
Oh, good, I thought. Please kill me before I get my head into one of these mooks’ guts. This isn’t me. I don’t want to do this.
The largest of the men led the way. “Hey!”
When he was ten feet away, my head came up and I bared my bloody teeth. The brain parasites were alert to danger. In the attack on the mercenaries, the brain parasites were brutally efficient. I wondered if they’d get me to pop up and run away instead of facing three large men head on, at once. I stood and sniffed the air.
“Hey!” the big man repeated.
I looked at him while his friends began to circle in opposite directions. If they were smart, they would have retrieved the weapons from the fallen mercenaries and simply shot me. They weren’t that smart.
“Why are you doing that?” the leader asked.
I glanced at the corpse at my feet. I wanted to tell him I wished I was a vegetarian but I still couldn’t speak. I tried to form the words. My face, lips and tongue were shut off from my brain. I was the Observer, only able to watch events unfold.
I heard something far off. Something was coming. At first it sounded like drums. If you’re going to kill me, you better hurry up, guys, I thought. I tried hard to warn them. I could not. I’d seen the victims of the brain parasites form words, mouthing something … but only while they were attacking me. Perhaps, in the heat of battle, the demands of taking over a body meant the parasites could not or did not allot resources to stop a message from getting out. Unless I could attack a bunch of lip readers, it was useless to simply mouth words. I never expected the apocalypse to be so damn frustrating and complicated.
Worse, the pounding drums weren’t drums. That was the sound of running feet on asphalt.
“Thanks for stopping those assholes,” the big man said, “but you can’t do that.”
Can’t you hear that, you big dummy? You should run and hide now.
One of his buddies ran at me screaming the word, “Cannibal!” He should have saved his war cry for after he bashed my head in. I ducked the stick of lumber and smashed the bearded man with a balled fist. The brain parasites didn’t mess around. I didn’t simply crack him in the jaw. It was a throat punch. My assailant went down hard.
The second man was coming at me at the same time.
Good for them, I thought. Taking turns at taking a swing at me is a bad strategy, usually seen only in dumb movies.
He managed to hit me in the side. It hurt my ribs but I trapped the two-by-four under my arm. My attacker held on, trying to wrench it back for another swing. I kicked him inside of his left knee. He moaned in agony as he was staggered back. He didn’t have much time to think about that pain. I kicked him in the balls next. His eyes rolled up as he fell to the pavement.
It was the leader of the trio that got me with his two-by-four. At least I think it was. He bashed me across the back of the head. I saw stars as I fell to the ground.
A pair of Timberland work boots almost filled my vision. Behind that pair of big boots and denim-covered legs I glimpsed the end of the world barreling down Lakeshore Boulevard. I rolled over to my back. Despite the bees buzzing in my head, I was getting ready to spring back up. I hoped the big man would have the time to finish me. Instead, he rushed to try to haul his friends upright. That man was a real hero. He was screaming for the man I’d punched in the throat to wake up as he pulled his other buddy up into a fireman’s carry.
That’s when the first of the uninfected civilians, fleeing from the war zone, ran past. They’d finally heard what was coming and it rightly terrified them. Some yelled, “Run! Run!” Most saved their breath.
The big guy tried to save his friends, pulling frantically at car doors to find one that was unlocked.
The first zombies to arrive leaped and pulled him to the roadway. He tried to bat them away and succeeded at first. However, there were too many. A horde had spilled over from the Gardiner Expressway downtown. They’d chased fleeing Torontonians to their deaths. They must have turned many more into zombies as they went about their bloody rampage. The boulevard was a river of cars flooded with countless ghouls.
I don’t pray but I did then. I prayed they’d stop to eat me. Instead, they ignored me and ate the trio of heroes. Those brave men armed with nothing but sticks of wood went down screaming in pain, first from the wounds I’d inflicted and then at the teeth of my brethren.
As I passed out, I silently mouthed the words: Sorry. Sorry. I’m sorry.
Chapter 32
CHLOE
“They killed the dozers,” Alphonse said.
But the zombies didn’t kill the bulldozers. They killed the people driving the bulldozers. That left a tank plowing through downtown Toronto to clear a path for us.
Waiting inside the LAV, cramped and shaky, I listened to Tom and Jerry bicker back and forth. “We should do the insertion at night,” Tom said.
Jerry shook his head. “Nah, man. Night or day don’t matter to animals. You ever hunt a bear? You think a grizzly is easier to deal with at night? Or a bunch of grizzlies? They’d just sneak up on ya.”
“We are so screwed.”
“Yeah, sure, but not because we’re coming at this during the day. We’re screwed because we didn’t come in here with a larger contingent. They keep the lid on us so cranked down, we can’t do this right. They want it done clean. This won’t be clean.”
“Who is in charge of this?” I asked.
The intercom clicked in. “I am,” Alphonse said, “and I’ll thank you for not complaining, boys. You’ll make the civvies skittish. Stop scaring the horses.”
I didn’t think he’d been listening.
I looked to Ken Rigg. “Any news?”
Rigg didn’t look up from his phone. “The military is making a ring around the city,” Thomas said.
Toronto is huge. That didn’t make sense to me. “Do we have enough military for that?”
Rigg nodded but Tom and Jerry both laughed. Then Jerry leaned closer, trying to keep out of Alphonse’s earshot. “We definitely don’t have enough personnel for that. Not even if we add troops of angry Boy Scouts.”
“Ringing an infected town has worked in … uh … war game scenarios,” Rigg objected.
“But that doesn’t matter if we don’t have enough personnel,” Shelly said. “I smell some shit of the bull here, Dr. Rigg.”
Tom and Jerry’s snickers were cut off by the report of a heavy gun in the distance.
“That, ladies and gentleman, is a Leopard 2A4 tank leading the bloody baddies away,” Alphonse said over the intercom.
Another volley of gunfire sounded in the distance. This time it was the rattle of small arms fire. The shots came quick and close together. That might have been the advance team’s attempt to get maximum attention to their diversion. It sounded so erratic that I pictured a group of soldiers firing wildly as mobs of zombies chased them down.
The tank gun roared again and then the bass rattle of a heavier machine gun fired in long spurts. The echoes of continuous fire went on and on. Soon, the cacophony retreated into the distance.
Alphonse received a quick, pa
nicked transmission: “Big Dog, come!”
The LAV’s engine kicked into high gear as the personnel carrier lurched forward. Alphonse made a quick turn that slammed me deeper into my seat. The quick turns continued. We rocked back and forth and bounced as Alphonse pushed the LAV to its limit.
“How fast can this thing go?” I asked.
“Sixty-two miles an hour,” Jerry said, “and never quite as fast as I’d like.”
“No speeding tickets in the zombie apocalypse,” Tom added.
“No ambulances if we crash, either,” Shelly said.
“Crashing’s no problem,” Tom said. “We can crash into lots of stuff and it won’t bother the LAV much.”
“Rolling,” Jerry said. “Rolling over is the real danger. Eight wheels, but LAVs can roll over like Daddy’s doggy. We roll, it’s like shaking eggs in a metal box. That’ll break your yolk.”
Tom made a show of examining the LAV’s compartment. “I think we’ll be fine. I always pictured myself in a pine coffin, not a steel one — ”
“You guys can shut up now,” I said. “All your witty bullshit sounds to me like you’re trying too hard. You’re terrified, just like the rest of us.”
Tom gave me a hard look. “You don’t know us. How would you know how scared we are?”
“If you’re not scared, you must be really stupid. Which is it?”
To their credit, Tom and Jerry both laughed, nodded and shut up.
Chapter 33
DANIEL
I am down in the dark again and that creepy voice comes out of the dark. Nina Simone could sound like that sometimes. “We are so curious about you, Daniel. You are different from the Others. You are First so we are encountering new variables in your responses to stimuli. Your behaviors are fascinating, so complex and conflicted.”
The NEXT Apocalypse (Book 2): AFTER Life: Purgatory Page 11