The Down Home Zombie Blues

by Linnea Sinclair

  Tam screamed.

  “Stop it, Prow!”

  “The memory never fades, does it? You know exactly what she’s going through.” He moved his fingers to his wrist again as he stepped toward her. Away from Tam. “Are you ready to listen to me now?”

  It was the only chance she had. She had to let him touch the implant signal. She had to pray that, in that microsecond, he’d be focused on the implant, and his reflexes with his pistol would be just that much slower than hers.

  Head shot. The rifle would lose a little after breaking through the shielding, but a head shot was her best chance. She watched his fingers. Forgive me, Tamlynne. But it’s going to hurt for a little longer.

  “Go to hell,” she told him through gritted teeth.

  Prow’s shield suddenly flared bright red and he staggered back, body twisting at the waist, iridescent eyes wide in surprise.

  Out of the corner of her eye Jorie recognized Theo, his large projectile weapon clutched in both hands. Theo moving steadily toward her out of his bathroom doorway.

  Prow stumbled, one hand now clutching his shoulder. Blood gushed between his fingers as if he’d been stabbed. No, not stabbed—shot by Theo’s nil-tech pistol. How and why that was, she had no time to consider. Prow raised his weapon.

  Jorie darted sideways and fired, Hazer energy boring a yellow ringed hole in the already disintegrating L-2 shield. Prow ducked, twisting again. Another loud crack from her left. Another red flare.

  Prow screamed something into his transcomm, and before she could get him in her sights again, he was gone.

  The restrainer field around Tamlynne Herryck evaporated with his departure.

  “Tam!” Jorie dropped to her knees, pressing her hand against her lieutenant’s pale, damp face. The woman shivered, convulsions starting. There was no time to deal with them. The Tresh could be back at any moment. She had to secure the structure.

  “Theo—”

  But he was already there beside her, on his knees.

  “She’s going to convulse,” she told him quickly. “Keep her stable. Don’t let her hurt herself. I have to set shields around your structure. Then I can help.”

  She sprang to her feet, lunging for the row of tech along the wall. She pushed her mouth mike into place, and with three words she segued her scanner to the larger tech units and continued to work voice commands while her fingers keyed in overrides.

  Theo’s structure wasn’t large. She could lock it down for now. The Tresh might eventually unscramble her shielding, but it would buy her time. Time to get help for Tam. Time to search for Rordan.

  “Grid One in place. Grid Two.” She spoke out loud, hoping Tam could hear her and would know what her commander was doing, why she wasn’t at her side. “Grid Three. Holding, locking. Grid Four. Almost there. Locking now. Grid Five. Synchronizing. Holding. Locking.” She took one last look at the security pattern, checking for breaches. “We’re secure.”

  She sucked in a long breath and pulled her hand away from the screen. It was shaking.

  She turned around. Theo had wrapped a blanket around Tamlynne and was holding her head back, keeping her airway clear. He glanced at her.

  “The Tresh can’t beam back in?”

  “Not now,” Jorie said, crouching down beside them, scanner out. She picked up the resonance of the unit Prow had injected in Tam almost immediately. “He put an implant in her,” she told Theo as the scanner searched through hundreds of combinations to find the right code to neutralize the implant. “Like yours. Except—”

  “Much worse.”

  “Much.” A series of numbers fell into line, then vanished. No. Close, but not the code. Vomit-brained whore spawns!

  “You had an implant,” Theo said. “A Tresh one—not one like mine.”

  She pulled her attention from the screen and looked at him. He must have heard her conversation with Prow while he was in his bathroom. How had he gotten in there? And how had he destroyed an L-2 shield? Questions she needed answered—later. “I was taken prisoner by the Tresh during the war. They put an implant in me, yes.”

  He just nodded, his eyes darkening with emotion.

  She went back to her screen. She didn’t want his pity.

  More numbers lined up. She held her breath. Could it be…? Yes. Yes. The implant’s power field dropped down three levels. Tam’s shuddering halted, and her cries of anguish were replaced by soft moans. Jorie couldn’t shut down the Tresh restrainer completely. But she could at least make the pain somewhat bearable, until a med-tech…

  “Will she be okay?” Theo touched Jorie’s arm.

  “I…For now.” There were no Guardian med-techs here. And, depending on what kind of signal she could rig from whatever tech remained, it could be months, even a year, before a Guardian ship could find them. Damn you, Prow!

  “What’s wrong?” Theo asked softly.

  Damn you, Petrakos, she wanted to say. Sometimes I swear you read my mind.

  “Can you put her on the bed? If she’s warm and she sleeps, it will be better.”

  Theo lifted Tam gently, Jorie unwrapping the blanket as he did so. Then she tucked it around Tam again as Theo pushed a pillow under the lieutenant’s curls. Tam whimpered, but exhaustion and pain took its toll. Her eyes fluttered closed.

  Jorie ran through the codes two more times but found nothing better. She put her scanner on the bedside table. Its signal would block the implant as best it could until she could rig a dedicated unit out of what was left of the tech in the spare room.

  “It’s still hurting her.” It wasn’t a question. Theo seemed to know Jorie couldn’t shut down the implant.

  “That’s not the only problem.” She ran both hands through her hair, her muscles suddenly taught with anger. “It will kill her. Two, three days. If we don’t disengage it, it will kill her. And the ship, my med-techs, aren’t here to help. Damn it!” She spun away from him, from Tam lying helpless in the wide bed, and headed for the hall, chest tight, eyes blurring.

  Theo caught up with her at the doorway, one arm circling her waist, the other around her back, gathering her and her rifle against him, hard. For a moment she stiffened, wanting to pull away, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. Theo’s face—that very good face—was in her hair. He whispered her name, telling her, “Hush, it will be all right.”

  It would not be all right. Her ship was gone. The Tresh were here. The zombies were in Tresh control. She was stuck on a nil world. Her top lieutenant and close friend was dying. And she had no idea if Kip and Jacare were even alive.

  So she clung to Theo, her good friend Theo, just for a moment. Clung to his reassuring warmth and hard-muscled strength and closed her eyes, tucking her face against his neck.

  It would not be all right. But at least for the next few moments, she was not alone.

  “Hush, Jorie.”

  She raised her face. “I have more problems. And work to do.”

  He brought his hands to rest on her shoulders. “We have work to do. And we’ll solve these problems together. But first,” and he grinned sheepishly, “I have to rescue my laser pistol. It, uh, got wedged behind the toilet when I climbed through the bathroom window to try to sneak up on Prow.”

  “You climbed through…?” Jorie shook her head distractedly at his embarrassment and at the mental picture of Theo’s large form squeezing through the small opening. “Why didn’t you use the Tresh rifle?” It was still draped across his chest.

  “I’ve never shot it.”

  She’d forgotten, again, that he was a nil. “I’ll show you later,” she said, and stepped into the hallway, her mind already sorting through plans, options. A bit of bliss luck: they’d acquired two more weapons. But their locale was her immediate concern. Theo’s residence was small enough; she might be able to set the shields in a randomizer pattern that would baffle the Tresh for a good long while. That would provide her with a secure base of operations but would also limit her movements.

  A lot also depended on h
ow large a base the Tresh had here. They must have more than that house she’d found. Obviously the Guardians had underestimated them. Interrogating the Tresh female could—

  She stopped in the main room. The female wasn’t on the floor. Hell’s wrath! She flipped the Hazer back to stun, turning quickly. “Petrakos!”

  Quick footsteps from the hall behind her. “Here. What—”

  Jorie glanced over her shoulder at him. “Where is she?”

  “She?” He had his G-1 out now. “Fuck.”

  Jorie understood the emotion behind the word if not the meaning.

  Theo crossed the room and stopped at the galley doorway, his weapon angled against his chest. Jorie sprinted behind him, listening for the same thing he was: a Tresh female, waiting for them.

  She heard nothing. She checked the readout on her Hazer, looking for the possible resonance of an L-1 or L-2 shield—the best she could hope for without her weapon pointed at a target. Nothing again. She signaled her lack of information to Theo with a shake of her head and a slight shrug, then flipped her oc-set into place.

  “On three.” His voice was barely above a whisper. “One. Two—”

  He swept into the galley, moving right. She followed, going left. The galley was empty. They both spun slowly around one more time, then lowered their weapons.

  “Shit,” Theo said through tight lips. Jorie held back from pointing out that while a spoor trail would certainly be helpful in finding the female, the Tresh didn’t routinely leave behind excrement in their wakes. She’d begun to figure out that references to deities, excrement, and certain other bodily functions, when uttered in anger, were a sign of intense displeasure on this world.

  “Let’s recheck the house.” Theo pushed past her, out of the galley. Jorie hurried after him. Five minutes later they were in the galley again.

  Theo leaned against the counter next to the water dispenser and shook his head. “My fault. I take responsibility. She was out cold. I even cuffed her.” His eyes narrowed. “Bitch has my best cuffs. Unless…”

  He was reaching for the door to go outside when Jorie grabbed his arm.

  “Don’t! Your structure’s shielded.”

  He shot her a puzzled look, brow furrowing slightly. She stepped in front of him and pulled at the door. “Here.” She took his wrist and brushed the back of his hand against the faint haze visible through the ocular over her right eye.

  He jerked back with a short yelp. An alarm wailed briefly from the bedroom, then silenced. “That could be a problem if one of my neighbors comes over unexpectedly. Is there any way we could set it to only zap the Tresh?”

  “No, but I can reset the security perimeter to within your structure’s wall. Or only around specific rooms,” Jorie told him, again damning the fact she had to operate in a nil environment and not a military one. “But then you’ll have to be more careful.” He didn’t have an ocular and couldn’t see the shield as she could.

  Theo gingerly pushed the door closed. “I can deal with that better than I can deal with an innocent neighbor getting fried. Besides, if that Tresh woman does come back in, she’s not going to be much of a threat with her hands cuffed behind her back.”

  Jorie sagged back against the galley table, perching one hip on its edge. “I don’t think she’s out there. Sem’s body is gone. The Tresh must have transported them while I was confronting Prow.” And before she’d locked the structure down in a grid shield. Damn! Hell and damn. Eight years of hunting zombies with the Guardians and she’d gone soft on tactics against the Tresh.

  Theo had been staring out the door’s viewport. He turned to her. “Tell me about Prow and the other two Tresh.”

  “They’re Tresh Devastators. An elite force. You understand—”

  “Elite. Yes. Just go on. If I don’t understand something, I’ll ask.”

  Both their language skills had improved. One less thing to have to compensate for.

  “I only recognized the two males: Cordo Sem, the one we terminated in the main room. And Prow. Davin Prow. He’s Sem’s superior, or was. I have no reason to think that’s changed. Their presence tells me this is a very serious operation. It also tells me they’re close to completion or the Devastators wouldn’t be here. They’re not an advance team. You noticed Prow spoke Vekran?”

  “I heard him speak English, yeah. No offense, but he has no accent. I understood him better than I do you.”

  “He’s integrated—the Devastators can do that.”

  “Integrated?”

  Yes, of course, was on the tip of her tongue, but she stopped. The way Theo moved, the way he handled weapons, the way he almost unconsciously seemed to pick up on what needed to be done kept lulling her into a false sense of who and what he was. A male from a nil planet who knew nothing of the past several hundred years in the Chalvash System, who’d never heard of the council or the Tresh Border Wars.

  She sought the words she needed in Vekran, then simplified them as best she could. “It’s like another kind of implant, but one that enhances his brain’s natural abilities. A Tresh agent qualifies for this implant when he reaches Devastator status.”

  “A built-in translator?”

  “Yes. Among other functions.”

  “Like?” he prompted.

  She shrugged. The variations were so vast. “It depends on the parameters of the original bioprofile.”

  A slight drawing down of dark brows. “You’re telling me the Tresh are biologically engineered?”

  Ah! “You have that technology here, then?” There’d been nothing on that in Danjay’s reports. But perhaps Theo’s security status afforded him access to that information.

  “Rudimentary. Cloning of farm animals, that kind of thing. But it’s not common. And it’s never used with people. Humans.”

  “It’s very common in most technologically advanced systems. To the Tresh it’s—how is it said on Vekris?—the highest art.”

  Theo nodded slowly. “They’re all perfect. By deliberate design.”

  “Devastators most of all. If there’s a lack—as in linguistic abilities—it’s augmented biomechanically.” She watched his face. He was still nodding.

  “Got it,” he said after a moment. “So these Devastators came here already programmed to speak my language.”

  No, he hadn’t quite acquired knowledge, and she told him so. “Programmed to learn your culture and your language—which is very similar to Vekran, as you know—at a faster rate. From his fluency I’d say he’s been here longer than Danjay was. Which now also makes me question the zombie attack that killed him.” Something hovered at the edges of her mind again. She tried to focus and articulate it. “It didn’t seem right somehow. Danjay wasn’t stupid. We flew together. He was my gunner and—”

  And Prow knew that as well. Prow had had the files on her entire squadron and had taken great pride in showing them to her. And had no doubt integrated them into his memory.

  “And?” Theo prompted.

  “And Prow knew that if I was on the Sakanah, Danjay’s death would bring me dirtside.” She’d been so blind, so very blind. Like everyone else, she viewed the Tresh problem as solved. What else had she missed?

  “You mean you specifically? Or the Guardians?”

  “We’ve been here for almost four of your months. The Tresh could have called their ships in to confront us at any point.” And they hadn’t. Another puzzle. “But Danjay’s death…” She shook her head, her mind still sorting through everything. “I think that was aimed at me specifically.” She looked up at him, wondering how he’d perceive her when she told him why. Yes, he was in his planet’s security force. But he’d explained that his duties were protection. She’d been an assassin. “I killed Prow’s brother.”

  “Because of your war—”

  “Nikah Prow wasn’t a Devastator. He was a med-tech who designed the restrainer implants the Tresh use. It was happenstance my team came across him during a raid on a Tresh station. We were after their data. We had no in
dication he would be in the lab complex. I made the decision to take him with us. That was my error. It cost us time to subdue him. The Devastator team almost caught us. So I needed a diversion and decided he was it. I put him—bound—into an airlock and rigged a small explosive to the outer hatch. I knew his brother would stop to rescue him. They were”—Jorie put her index fingers side by side—“twins.”

  “Go on.”

  “I knew his brother would try to rescue him. I knew about how long it would take for them to open the door we’d jammed. At six seconds to go, I blew the outer hatch and spaced him.” She watched Theo’s face and then, when she saw little change, remembered where she was. His people might have more technological experience than she’d first surmised, but Theo most likely had no direct experience with what happens to a live body when it’s sucked into the vacuum of deep space.

  “It is,” she continued, “a very horrible way to die. A horrible thing to witness. I’m not proud of what I did. But it bought us time. And…” She closed her eyes briefly. “And I kept thinking of all my people who’d been tortured by the device he’d perfected. I was angry. I wanted him to suffer. I wanted his brother to suffer.”

  “That saved the lives of your team, allowed you to escape.”

  “We would have escaped anyway. Using Nikah Prow as a diversion gave us the time we needed. I had no reason to space him other than”—she drew a short breath—“other than I wanted to.”

  “Was this before or after his brother took you prisoner?”

  “Before.”

  “And he didn’t try to kill you for that?”

  A faint smile twisted her lips. “Personally, Davin hates me for killing Nikah. But he’s a Tresh Devastator. Professionally, he appreciates a job well done.”

  Theo was silent for a long moment. “And now he wants you to work with him.”

  “Believe nothing a Tresh says, unless it’s ‘I’m going to kill you.’” She shoved herself away from the table. The condemnation she’d halfway expected to hear from Theo over her actions hadn’t materialized. That made her feel marginally better, but she still wasn’t sure he fully understood what she’d done. Though he seemed to grasp why. “I have to check on Tamlynne.”