The Down Home Zombie Blues

by Linnea Sinclair

  “Jorie.” His voice stopped her in the doorway. She turned, expecting a question about Nikah Prow’s death. “Your ship’s gone. All we have is you and Tammy. If you accept his offer, will that protect my city, my world?”

  His words jolted her. She stared at him hard, part of her recognizing it was merely a question. He was a nil. Security trained or not, he didn’t know. But another part of her wanted to lunge at him and plant her fist in his face.

  She could face his condemnation for being an assassin. She could not live with being a traitor.

  She flexed her right hand. “I have to check on Tamlynne. And reset the shields.” She spun away from him and this time ignored the sound of her name—and the pain in her heart.

  16

  The shields were easy to reset within the structure’s walls, taking less than five minutes of her time. But the scanner hadn’t been able to devise a better combination, even after twenty minutes of intense concentration on Jorie’s part. The implant in Tamlynne’s shoulder still pulsed pain—with spikes of death—into her system.

  Tamlynne’s eyelids fluttered briefly, then closed again, when Jorie lay her hand on Tam’s forehead. Sleep was a good escape. But eventually even sleep would fail to provide respite.

  Jorie sat on the edge of the bed, fighting waves of exhaustion and frustration. Right now she’d gladly trade all her weapons for a med-tech’s JS-6-4. Then she’d have a chance of removing the unit. She was wondering if she could somehow modify her scanner into even a basic JS-6-1, when Theo appeared in the doorway.

  “I had to ask about Prow’s offer,” he said, coming to stand beside her. “I have to explore all options.”

  Jorie adjusted the blanket around Tamlynne without looking at him. She didn’t know what she’d see on his face—suspicion? Dismay? Or perhaps neither, just a basic devotion to duty, something she was supposed to understand. Most times she did, except when it came to Theo Petrakos. Being with him set off a chain of unsettling emotions she did not want to—could not—deal with at the moment. “I cannot make decisions for you or your people, Petrakos. Perhaps that best be said now. But the Tresh are not and will never be an option for me or any Guardian.”

  Tam uttered a soft moan, then shivered. Jorie’s throat tightened. She’d lost team members before. She didn’t know a Guardian—or a marine—who hadn’t. But there was something different about dying in the heat of battle, leaving this existence kicking and screaming, and succumbing slowly, helplessly, to pulses of unending pain.

  And something was even worse about losing Tam after just losing Danjay. She was still trying to process his death, going over and over in her mind if she’d done something wrong. Or if she hadn’t done something that might have kept him alive.

  And then there was Kip Rordan. What limited scans she could perform gave no hints of his whereabouts or his fate.

  “What are the Tresh doing here?” Theo’s question brought her out of her dark ruminations.

  “Prow didn’t share that information with me. I can only guess.”

  “Then guess.” Theo’s voice was insistent. “It’s crunch time, Jorie. Do or die.”

  She did look at him this time and saw the intensity in his dark eyes, the taut line of his mouth. “I need data in order to formulate my guesses.”

  She stepped away from Tam’s still form on the bed, then hunkered down in front of her array of MOD-tech on the floor. She pulled up her mouth mike and spoke soft commands in Alarsh. Data rose and merged, scenarios and probabilities appeared. Her tech continued to pick up energy streams even after the Tresh had destroyed the main units in the other room. Why Prow had left these untouched…

  It may have been simply that their return interrupted his plans. Or it might be something else.

  She went back to her data, peripherally aware of Theo prowling about his structure—but evidently remembering her warning about the structure’s shielding, because she heard no curse-filled yelps or jangling alarms. Which was just as well. She didn’t want to think about Sergeant Theo Petrakos, because when she thought about him, she felt things. And she couldn’t afford that luxury now. Her worries about her ship, about Tam, Kip, and Jacare could overwhelm her if she let them. Her disappointment in Theo Petrakos—If you accept his offer, will that protect my city, my world?—threatened to choke her.

  For no reason! He was a nil, a damned nil. Nothing more.

  Except…

  A soft nudge against her arm. Th—Petrakos with a glass of ice water. “You want something to eat? It’s almost seven. Dinnertime.”

  She accepted the water and sipped at it.

  Then her scanner emitted three strident tones.

  She dropped the water glass, aware of its thud against the floor, aware of the slosh of the precious, invaluable liquid against her skin. She didn’t care. The harsh tones signaled a medical emergency.

  Tamlynne Herryck had stopped breathing.

  Jorie shot to her feet, heart pounding, and was at Tam’s side in three long steps. She grabbed her scanner, saw the ineffectual codes, and damned the fact she had no functional med-kit in the structure. Her skin chilled in spite of the anger welling up inside her as she worked frantically to reset the codes and block the implant.

  “What’s the matter?” Theo clasped her shoulder.

  “Respiratory failure! And this unit won’t—”

  Theo shoved her aside and grasped Tamlynne’s face, one hand over her lieutenant’s nose, his mouth covering hers, forcing his breath….

  Manual resuscitation. It was such an antiquated method that it took Jorie a few shocked seconds to process what she was seeing. She’d seen teachtapes of the method but never used it. With med-’droids or med-techs everywhere—even during the war—there’d been no need.

  Until now.

  She prayed it worked. She tore her gaze away from Theo breathing life into Tamlynne and concentrated again on the scanner. She had to weaken the implant, decrease its output. The jamming codes the scanner had produced weren’t sufficient. She needed a damned JS-unit. Unless she could somehow bypass the units codes altogether and—

  “Keep her alive!” she rasped at Theo, and lunged back at her tech stacked along the wall. There had to be something in the emergency datafiles, even though this was all Guardian tech—Guardians who were concerned only with destroying the zombies. Not with confronting the Tresh. If she could access the ship…

  But she couldn’t. She barked search terms into her mouth mike, barely waiting for the results of one query to appear before demanding the next. Ten, twelve years ago she’d have had this information at her fingertips. But she was no longer in the marines, with intelligence data on the Tresh coming in daily.

  If she didn’t find those Tresh overrides, Tamlynne would die.

  “She’s breathing on her own.” Theo sounded hoarse but elated.

  Jorie glanced at him over her shoulder, relief rising, then waning. “It won’t last. This is the first of many attacks. It just happened sooner than I expected.”

  Theo dropped down on the edge of the bed, hands against his thighs, head slightly bowed. His shoulders sagged, then he turned and seemed to study Tam’s still form. Jorie shared his frustration. The anger—and helplessness—inside her seethed so virulently, she felt that if a zombie were to appear in the room right now, she was perfectly capable of tearing the thing apart with her bare hands.

  But that wouldn’t help Tamlynne.

  “I thought that buffered the pain,” he said, turning back and pointing to her scanner on the bedside table.

  “Only temporarily. I told you—”

  “Yeah. It will kill her.” He wiped one hand over his face. “So what do we do?”

  “I’m trying to find override codes. The Guardians were never involved in the war with the Tresh. They don’t archive data on them like the Kedrian Marines do. If the ship were here, I could access its library or link to the military libraries at Central Command. But—”

  “Can we remove the implan
t?”

  “Remove?”

  “Your med-tech put one inside me. How does it come out?”

  “With a JS-Six-Four,” and as she said it she knew that meant nothing to him. “It’s essentially a miniature PMaT. I don’t have one.”

  “How about surgically?” Theo made a cutting motion with his hand down his shoulder.

  “The JS-Six-Four is used in surgery.”

  “No. With a knife. Or your laser on low power.”

  Jorie stared at him, grotesque barbaric visions of sliced flesh oozing blood coming to her mind. “We haven’t used those methods in hundreds of years. I wouldn’t even know how—”

  “I know someone who does. It’s the way things are done here all the time. She’s a doctor. And an EMT—an emergency medical technician. The wife—she’s spoused to Zeke Martinez.”

  “A nil?”

  “A doctor.”

  “Theo, to involve a nil med-tech would reveal our presence—”

  “Damn it, Jorie!” He shot to his feet, hands fisted at his sides. “If you don’t get that thing out of Tammy’s shoulder, she’s going to die. Is that what you want?”

  A soft, pained whimper came from the bed behind Theo.

  Jorie closed her eyes for a moment, her training and all the platitudes about a Guardian’s duty warring inside her, battling against what she knew she had to do.

  “No.” Jorie rose and faced Theo. Captain Pietr and the entire council could strip her of her rank one hundred times over for violating gen-pro regulations if they wanted to. If it came to that, she would face them. She would accept their punishment, their censure.

  She’d already lost Danjay. But she was not going to let her lieutenant die.

  Theo punched in Zeke Martinez’s cell-phone number as he trotted down the street toward the park where he and Jorie had left his SUV. Twilight was edging into night, the air cooling but still warm for late December in Florida. He tried to remember if Zeke and Suzanne went to her sister’s for Christmas Eve dinner. Maybe it was New Year’s. All he did know was this was a bad time to call and ask for a favor.

  He had no choice. And it wasn’t just Tammy’s condition that forced him to take action. It was that Jorie was alone on this mission. He wasn’t going to have her lose her life too, for his world.

  Not if there were options. He felt there were.

  He put the cell phone to his ear and waited for Zeke to answer.

  It didn’t take long—third ring. With caller ID, Zeke already knew who was calling.

  “Yassou, amigo. What you got?” Zeke asked, mixing the Greek word for hello with Spanish.

  “Unofficial business. You and Suzanne with family or something?”

  “Business? Man, it’s Christmas Eve. You’re supposed to be on vacation.”

  “Unofficial, Zeke. And it’s actually Suzanne I need.” Theo could hear voices, laughter, and the clatter of dishes in the background. “You at her sister’s?”

  “The neighbors’. You were invited, if you remember.”

  He did now. Zeke had mentioned it last week. Before Liza Walters offered her cousin Bonnie to him. Before his one-woman war machine came into his life and turned everything upside down.

  “So what do you got, a sick cat? You don’t even own a cat, Theo.”

  Suzanne’s voice was faint but audible: “People don’t own cats, cats own people.”

  “Suzanne says—”

  “Yeah, I heard her. Listen, when will you two be freed up? You know I wouldn’t ask unless it was important.”

  “We haven’t even had dessert yet—ow!”

  Theo could envision Suzanne smacking Zeke on the arm. He’d seen her do it enough times. Especially when he heard, “Zeke, ask Theo what he needs.”

  “I need Suzanne to meet me at her clinic as soon as she can,” Theo said, before Zeke could repeat his wife’s instructions. And because Jorie couldn’t unequivocally discount that the Tresh might track—and respond to—the implant’s removal: “I need you to bring your Glock and rifle, and it’s probably not a bad idea to wear your vest.”

  “My—what do you got, some kind of wild dog? Sure you shouldn’t be calling animal control?”

  “No wild dogs. No cats either.” Theo searched for the right words to at least alert Suzanne she’d be dealing with a human, utilizing her EMT skills as well as her veterinary ones. “I’ve got an illegal military operative with a time bomb in her shoulder.”

  “A spook?” Zeke dropped his voice to a harsh rasp. “CIA?”

  “Something like that.” He’d reached his car, blessedly still where they’d left it. It beeped twice as he unlocked it with the remote. “I need to keep this totally below the radar. When can you break free?”

  “Sure you’re sober?”

  “Completely.” Though when this was all over, a three-day binge might be a great idea. If he had any vacation time left.

  “Hang on.”

  Theo slid in and started the engine, then backed out of the tree-shaded space.

  He shifted to drive and Zeke came back on. “Forty-five minutes okay for you? Quarter to eight?”

  “Quarter to eight is great. And thanks, Zeke. I really mean this. I didn’t want to get you two involved, but our backs are against the wall here.”

  “Our? Wait. This operative. Is that the gal I met? Jorie?”

  Theo hesitated. “She’s one of them,” he admitted as he pulled down his driveway. “But not the one who’s injured.”

  “There are more?”

  “I’ll explain when I see you.” He flipped the cell phone closed, climbed out of the SUV, and locked it. Jorie nudged open the back door—she must have turned off those sizzle shields. When he pulled the door shut behind him, she was busy making peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches. She stopped just long enough to tap at her scanner. Shields back on, he assumed, as he grabbed a can of orange soda from the fridge. Jorie had her usual glass of water. Helluva Christmas Eve dinner. No vasilopita, no lucky coin. But they had to eat something. He couldn’t remember the last time he had a real meal. He didn’t know when they’d get the next chance to eat one.

  “We leave in fifteen minutes,” he told her, snagging half a sandwich from the plate as they stood together at the kitchen counter near the sink. That gave them plenty of time. It would take, max, twenty minutes to get to Suzanne’s veterinary clinic. Less if he ran Code 3.

  “You remember what you thought when you were on the Sakanah? When you understood exactly who the Guardians were, why we were here?”

  He bit into the sandwich, nodded, swallowed. “Yeah, I know—”

  “Revealing our existence never goes well with nils. I accept this is necessary to save Tam’s life. I’m grateful. But you need to be prepared. This will not be a blissful experience, Theo.”

  That, he mused, finishing off the rest of the PB&J, was probably the understatement of the century. But at least she was calling him Theo again. He took another swig of soda, then reached for his second sandwich half. “Zeke and I go back a long time. He trusts me. I trust him.” He wondered for a moment how Jorie would react when she found out Suzanne was primarily an animal doctor, not a people one, her years as an EMT notwithstanding. He shrugged it off as the least of his worries.

  Right now it was more important that he and Jorie start working as a true team. “Tell me what guesses you’ve been able to come up with about the Tresh’s presence here.”

  She stared past him for a moment, and he was aware of the shadows under her eyes. And he was aware, once again, of what Commander Jorie Mikkalah had to be feeling, facing. When that Tresh agent, Prow, had pointed out how alone she was, she’d said—with a chin-raised confidence Theo tagged as pure Jorie—that someone would be back for her.

  But pure Jorie, Theo had learned, didn’t always tell the truth. And he doubted she’d tell a Tresh how frightened she was.

  He didn’t know if the Guardians would come back for Jorie. He didn’t think Jorie knew that answer either.

&nb
sp; She turned to him. “Once I factored in the Tresh presence here and factored in what I know they’re capable of, it all became clear. Or more clear.” She shook her head slightly. “One never completely knows with the Tresh. But my best guess, and I think you can take that as almost a certainty, is that they’ve been using your world as a breeding ground for an altered zombie. A more perfect one.”

  “Like the Tresh themselves,” he put in. And then, because he’d been a cop too long and making light of a serious situation was second nature to him, he added, “Are they at least going to make them prettier?”

  She shot him a narrow-eyed look, mouth pursed.

  He held up both hands, one of which contained his half-eaten sandwich. “Guilty as charged. Go on.”

  “I originally thought they might have acquired the code. Now I think they’ve programmed around it. Bypassed it somehow. My tech”—she waved one hand toward his bedroom, where Tammy lay asleep—“picked up duplicates of everything Lorik transmitted while we were out. It didn’t appear he knew what he was looking at but sent it for my input because he recognized—finally!—that he might have been wrong in his primary assessment. His report didn’t state the Tresh were involved. But he did agree that someone was tampering with the zombies. He delineated some tests to run on the next zombie we encountered. Lorik always has to be more than one hundred percent sure on everything,” she added, almost as much to herself as to him.

  Theo pushed away his unease at the fact that Lorik no longer appeared to be on Jorie’s shit list. “Why do the Tresh need a more perfect zombie?”

  “Not perfect so much as obedient only to them. And this is a guess. But it’s one I’m fairly certain of, one I’ve told you before: to control the Hatches—our ships’ gateways through space.”

  He remembered that. The zombies had been built to maintain and guard the Hatches and check incoming ships for potentially deadly infections. Then something had gone terribly wrong, turning them rogue, wreaking havoc on various planets. It all had meant little to him the first time she’d explained it—was it only yesterday? Now it was all too real. And personal. The Tresh were using his world. And they would, if they could, kill his Jorie in order to keep on doing so.