The Down Home Zombie Blues

by Linnea Sinclair

  “She’s got you all wrapped up in knots, doesn’t she?”

  Actually, his feelings for Jorie were one of the few things he had no problems with. “This situation has me wrapped up in knots. It’s not only Jorie. There’s Tammy. Jorie’s more worried about her than she says, and I know she feels responsible for what happened. Both of them are suffering in their own ways.” He shook his head. “I keep thinking I’m going to wake up and it’s all a bad dream.” Except for Jorie. He wanted to wake up and find her beside him.

  “There’s only one way to end the bad dream, and you know it. We contact the lieutenant and he contacts the chief. Bring ’em here to see Big Butt-Ugly—”

  “Baby Butt-Ugly,” Theo corrected.

  “—and we go in loaded for bear.”

  Theo’s brain knew Zeke was right. But Theo’s heart was afraid he’d lose Jorie in the process.

  It was a damning discovery. One made possible, Jorie told Theo and Zeke as they stood in the doorway of the brightly lit examining room, only because Lorik’s final report had pinpointed what she needed to do to find proof of the mutations. Doing that had taken Jorie and Suzanne almost two hours.

  Theo listened intently as she went down the list: a zombie with an embedded personal shield. A zombie with an accelerated growth rate, a maturity beyond its stated numerical age. A zombie that not only took data and guidance from the C-Prime but was now able to regenerate a portion of what it used and send it back.

  Making the C-Prime stronger. Making the C-Prime able to control a megaherd.

  No longer a parasitic relationship, with the herd draining the C-Prime until the herd was forced to split, but almost trophobiosis: a feeding, a mutual protection.

  Jorie put her scanner down on a nearby metal table. “Questions?”

  From down the corridor, Theo could hear Suzanne’s soft voice and a low squeal of excitement from Tammy. Suzanne had said she wanted to try something to help Tam focus, and judging from the glimpse of fluff a few moments ago, she’d brought a kitten out of the kennel and placed the creature in Tammy’s arms.

  Just as well. Tammy didn’t need to hear about these new and improved zombies, anyway.

  “How many are there, total?” Zeke was asking.

  “Last count was three hundred eleven,” Jorie told him, “but we terminated a few. If they’ve regenerated those, they’re still in the egg stage.”

  Egg? Theo did not want to see what zombie eggs looked like.

  Zeke nodded. “How long from egg to zombie?”

  “In your planetary terms?” Jorie closed her eyes for a moment. “Two weeks, your time, egg to hatchling. They grow quickly after that. Three weeks to primary juvenile. Another four to six, depending on availability of foodstuffs, to full juvenile.”

  “But that’s the old zombies,” Theo said, remembering information she’d given him over the past few days. “Not the new and improved.”

  “I have no idea of the time line now, other than it would be faster. And I don’t know if it accelerates all stages or just one. Egg to hatchling, maybe. Or juvenile to drone. I’d need time to determine that answer.”

  And time, Theo knew, they didn’t have.

  Zeke caught that as well. “In another two, three months there could be a hundred more of these things.”

  “At minimum. There are no sexes. All zombies can replicate and can do so every six days when needed to expand the herd or to populate out a new one.” Jorie motioned toward an adjoining room, where the corpse of the zombie lay. “I can show you—”

  “No thanks.” Zeke closed his eyes and waved his hands in front of his face. “Pass.”

  Theo pushed away from the wall. There was something they were all missing here. Another factor. “The Tresh know we know this. They have to know we have the zombie.”

  “They also know I have no ship here, minimal weapons. They must know what I figured out—your projectile weapons can easily pierce their shields. This isn’t a flaw they’ll fix by tomorrow. But three, four days to design a correction?” She shrugged. “Another three or four to recalibrate their tech? I wouldn’t discount it.”

  She’d been elated when she’d realized a Tresh shield couldn’t stop a bullet. He had too, still thinking of some kind of small, private army. Nothing official. Nothing that would put Jorie’s face in the news. Just cops he could trust. With the full understanding that if something went wrong—if the brass or the media found out about his band of zombie vigilantes—he would take the fall. No question. He accepted that.

  But putting together his vigilantes would take time, with people being on different shifts and away for vacation. Two, three weeks, he could pull something together.

  “So we have a small window in which to act, both on the zombies reproducing the mutation and on the Tresh shoring up their defenses,” Theo said. “Do we have two weeks, at least? One?” New Year’s Eve? Could he pull this off by New Year’s Eve?

  “The more we delay, the more we give the Tresh the chance to reconfigure for projectiles,” Jorie said. “Two weeks from now there will be more zombies, and two weeks from now Tresh defenses will have improved. More people may die. My team and I have worked situations like that before, where we were brought in much later than we should have been. But it was only the zombies we fought, not the Tresh. And we fought them with full squadrons of gravrippers.

  “Remind me someday,” she told him with a nod as he paced to the other side of the room, “to tell you about Delos-Five. Three hundred fifty thousand people died before the Delos pritus agreed to let Guardian squadrons into their airspace.”

  He had no idea what a pritus was—some kind of head honcho or group, he assumed—but he clearly heard the pain in her voice at what she must have perceived as failing in her duty. A duty he knew he was asking her to delay.

  “We have a chance to avoid that stupidity, the senseless waste of life here,” she said as he paced back.

  “Without a squadron of those gravrippers?” Zeke asked.

  Jorie picked up her scanner and slid it into its holder under her sweater. “I don’t intend to chase down the C-Prime. I’m going to trigger a craving and bring it to me.”

  Bring the C-Prime to her? Panic jolted Theo. He gripped the edge of the table. “That’s suicide.”

  “I’ve done it before—”

  “A C-Prime? Alone?”

  “No, but—”

  Theo leaned closer. “With insufficient tech and no emergency transport?”

  “You never transit in close proximity to a zombie. It’s too risky. Five maxmeters is the initial safe zone.”

  “I saw that feeding frenzy, Jorie. I got tagged by one, for Christ’s sake. When you’re surrounded by zombies, there is no safe zone.”

  “I just need one shot at the C-Prime.”

  “One shot? At the heart, right? And if you miss?”

  She met his gaze squarely. “I’m not going to kill it. I’m going to reprogram it.”

  A vision of her climbing up the damned thing and shoving a DVD in its jaws jumped into his mind. Insanity. “Reprogram it?”

  “I’m going to use the accelerated exchange rate at which the zombies now interact to spread a kind of virus among them. If I start with the C-Prime, then everyone—every one,” she stressed, “will be infected. The C-Prime will give it to the juveniles, who’ll give it to the drones, who’ll bring it back—multiplied in strength, unless Lorik’s calculations are in error—to the C-Prime.” She paused. “They’ll terminate themselves.”

  “The Tresh can’t counteract that?” Zeke asked.

  “They’ll try. If they hadn’t created a megaherd and instead worked in smaller herds with a number of C-Primes, they could isolate several of the herds and correct the problem, maybe only losing one or two herds in the process. But here, everything is tied to one zombie. Once the C-Prime’s functions begin to fail, the herd will lose cohesiveness. It can’t split for safety, because there’s no strong, healthy secondary C-Prime rising in the ranks
to give that order, no uninfected secondary C-Prime to keep things under control. Once the C-Prime terminates, the infected herd will feed on itself.”

  The sound of Suzanne’s laughter filtered in. Theo glanced out the door as Zeke did, then he turned back to Jorie. “Couldn’t you kill the C-Prime and have the same result?”

  “That would disorient the herd, yes. But it wouldn’t guarantee that a secondary C-Prime wouldn’t develop, especially with the Tresh involved. We need them all sick and dying, the stronger feeding on the weaker, ingesting their virus, weakening and becoming prey themselves. That’s the only way I can guarantee the Tresh will have nothing to work with.”

  Theo massaged the growing ache between his eyebrows with two fingers. “I cannot let you take on a C-Prime by yourself—”

  “You do not hear my words.” Jorie was shaking her head, as if she were chastising him for forgetting to pick his socks up off the floor, not discussing a suicidal attempt at bagging a giant zombie. “I never said I was doing this alone. I said I would be the one responsible for targeting the C-Prime. Anyone else who cares to help will have more than enough to keep themselves busy.”

  Anyone else who cares to help. Meaning more than just Zeke. Theo stared at her. “And your regulations that forbid contact with my people?”

  “The regulations you kept demanding I break?” She raised her arms, then let them fall to her sides. “I see no other possible way to solve this. And I have to. I’m a Guardian Force commander. It’s my responsibility to protect all worlds from the problem we created. The fact that I’m the only functioning Guardian on this planet doesn’t change that. I have to violate the no-contact rule. But I will not break the one demanding I follow my duty.”

  “No. Wait.” Theo held up one hand.

  “What do you mean, wait?” She put her hands on her hips. “You’ve been a one-note symphony since I arrived on your world, telling me we must get your people involved.”

  “And you gave me war stories of all the problems that happen when Guardians reveal themselves to nil-techs,” he shot back.

  “Yes. They want our ships, our jumpdrives, our tech, our weapons. Well, there’s no ship for your people to have unless the Tresh offer theirs, and I doubt they will. I couldn’t build a jumpdrive if you held a Hazer to my head. As for tech, I’m going to have to reconfigure much of what I have in your residence just to adapt my Hazer and create the reprogramming dart with the virus. I have my scanner, of course. And Tam’s, though I may need to use that for parts as well.” She shrugged. “I have the G-Ones and the two Tresh weapons. But there’s nothing I can give your people that will bring them up to the technological level of the Guardians or help them get off this ball of dirt any faster. I can only tell them that, yes, other civilizations are out there and, yes, interstellar travel is possible. If they even believe me.”

  But they would believe her. Seeing the zombies and dissecting the dead ones would convince even the staunchest of skeptics. Which meant only two things: the zombies and Jorie would be all over the news channels, or they wouldn’t—they’d be in the deepest basement of the Pentagon.

  Theo couldn’t live with either outcome. He had to develop a third choice. A way to stop the zombies and the Tresh. A way to keep Jorie safe.

  In less than a week.

  He saw Zeke flip open his cell phone. Theo shot him a warning glance. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Just going to wish Lieutenant Stevens a Merry Christmas. And see if he wants to meet a zombie.”

  Theo closed his hand around the phone. “Give me a few hours.”

  “Theophilus—”

  “A few hours.”

  “The clerk’s office is closed. You can’t apply for a marriage license until tomorrow.”

  He was aware of Jorie watching them and listening. He glanced over his shoulder at her while he hung on to Zeke’s phone. “How long will it take you to make this reprogramming dart?”

  “If the ship were here? Two sweeps. Now?” She blew an exasperated sigh through her lips. “Earliest, two days. Moonrise, day after tomorrow. Or sunwake of the next.”

  Well, it beat the hell out of two hours.

  “Two days.” He plucked Zeke’s cell phone from his fingers, snapped it closed, then handed it back to him. “Two days.”

  “Providing we’re not attacked by any more zombies,” Jorie added.

  “You know, the fun just never stops.” Theo grabbed her hand and pulled her around the table toward him. “Go find Tammy. It’s time to go home.”

  Jorie went in search of Tamlynne, very aware she had no idea of what was going on in Theo’s head anymore. She thought he’d be bliss-infused to learn she was willing to work with his people. He was furious. She thought he’d want to attack the problem right away. He was hesitating.

  Following the sound of Suzanne’s voice, she found Tam in the clinic’s small mess hall. It smelled of that coffee Theo so loved. Tam and Suzanne were sitting at a square table. Between them, a dancing and pouncing kitten—she was very sure that was the Vekran word—with bluish-gray fur attacked small balls of paper that Tam, laughing, flicked across the tabletop.

  Suzanne looked up when Jorie entered. “This has helped,” she said softly, motioning to the kitten.

  “Look, sir! Isn’t he wonderful?” Tam ran her hand over the small back.

  A sentence. A full sentence in Alarsh. No hesitation. No singsong inflection. Jorie shot a quick glance at Suzanne, then back to Tam again. “He’s very handsome,” she answered, also in Alarsh.

  “Suzanne say,” Tam switched to Vekran, “cute. The cat is cute.” She hesitated between each word, but it wasn’t the hesitation Jorie had heard before but rather the normal one of someone learning a new language. Vekran. English.

  “Yes?” Tam continued, looking at Suzanne. “Correct?”

  “That’s correct.” Suzanne nodded. “The cat is cute.”

  Tam patted the table. “Table. Chair. Maga. Zine.” She touched or pointed to the different items, naming them. “Ceelink. Vindow.”

  “I’ve been doing basic right-brain–left-brain exercises with her,” Suzanne told Jorie. “You understand what I mean by that?”

  Jorie nodded, her throat tight. Suzanne’s compassion for Tam, a stranger, was a rare blessing. “So there’s hope?” she managed after a moment.

  “Her mind and her body need time to heal. Your doctors have machines to speed that up. We don’t. All I can do is keep her exercising her brain, her senses. And hope whatever memories were repressed will surface.”

  Tam cradled the kitten and placed a soft kiss on its head.

  Jorie pulled out a chair and sat. “Lieutenant,” she said in Alarsh. “Guardian Force Field Regulation, Section Twelve, Paragraph Three, Subsection A.”

  Tam blinked. “If…if shielding malfunctions and cannot be repaired, the T…the T…” She frowned. “The T-MOD, yes! The T-MOD must be destroyed. Sir.” She looked at Jorie and smiled.

  Jorie smiled back, a small weight lifting from her heart.

  “What was that?” Suzanne asked, one eyebrow lifting.

  Jorie switched back to Vekran. “Something every green-as-liaso-hedges ensign would know. One of the most-quoted Guardian regulations. I gave her the cite. She replied with the regulation. She stumbled a bit, but she repeated it.”

  “Are you and Theo going to take her back to his house?” Suzanne asked as Jorie heard the sounds of footsteps approaching.

  “He asked that I retrieve her.”

  Suzanne laid her hand on Jorie’s arm. “A suggestion. Let her stay with Zeke and me for a day or two.”

  “Who’s staying with us?” Zeke Martinez came up behind Suzanne.

  The dark-haired woman turned. “I’d like Tamlynne to spend a few days at our house, Ezequiel. Hear me out.” She raised one hand. “I am a doctor. Tam’s been through a traumatic experience, one her brain associates with a certain location. I think the fact that she’s improved since she came here—aside from the
hour or so I’ve worked with her—is because she’s no longer having flashbacks or reacting to an implanted autosuggestion triggered by being in Theo’s house. I want to keep her out of the environment she associates with the attack.”

  “But—”

  “We have the room. The guest room your mother uses when she visits.”

  “—it’s Christmas,” Martinez finished.

  “Yes. And where’s your generosity of spirit?”

  “It could be dangerous, Suzy.” Theo perched on the edge of the table. Jorie felt his hand rest on her shoulder. “The Tresh could come gunning for her.”

  “Then why haven’t they?” Suzanne asked. “They haven’t come to this clinic.”

  Theo looked down at Jorie, one eyebrow slightly arched.

  “They follow tech and PMaT trails,” Jorie said. “The Tresh knew about your residence because of the Guardian tech there. The same way I found the structure they were using.”

  “I know Zeke asked you this before, but are you sure there’s no way they knew you were in my house when they sent the zombie?” Theo motioned to the corridor where the dead zombie’s body now lay secured in a cold-storage unit.

  “I can’t tell you what they know,” Jorie said. “But I can tell you that if I were working a nil world and saw Guardian shields over a structure and Guardian tech trails emanating from that same structure, I’d feel fairly sure a Guardian was in that vicinity.”

  Which was how they found Danjay Wain. She had no doubt of that now.

  “And since I have Tamlynne’s scanner and the Tresh implant has been removed,” Jorie continued, “they have no way of tracking her specifically. If anything, they’d return to the implant’s last signal, and that’s Theo’s residence. Not here and not your residence,” she said with a nod to Martinez.

  “It’s not rocket science, Theo.” Martinez punched Theo lightly on the arm. “Get it? Rocket science. Outer-space aliens.”

  Jorie frowned. “Starship propulsion has nothing—”

  Theo ruffled her hair. “Don’t encourage him. Please.”