The Down Home Zombie Blues

by Linnea Sinclair

  She also saw the darkening of his eyes every time he realized that.

  “It’s my duty to report what I’ve found out about the Tresh.”

  He hunkered down next to her, shoving his gun in his holster as he did so. “We had this conversation three days ago. Only I was telling you about my duty to be here. Do you remember what you told me? That you try to take what’s bad and make it into bliss. Well, I’ve been trying to do that for you. Trying to let you know you’re welcome here. More than welcome here. With me.” He chucked her gently under the chin with two fingers. “It’s not that I don’t understand, babe. I do. I just don’t know how to make things perfect for you.”

  He rose, then strode to the large viewport and stared out it without further comment.

  “Nothing’s ever perfect, Theo,” she said after a while. Such were the problems of living in the here and now, she wanted to add but didn’t. They were both adults. They both knew that.

  He turned, shaking his head. “Ain’t that the damned truth.” He motioned to the door. “I need coffee. Drop the sizzle shields so I can go to the kitchen.”

  “I’ll leave that door unshielded when you’re here. Any PMaT transits in the area, or portal formations, will set off the alarms on my scanner. But at night or when I’m alone, we should keep all shields up.” She keyed in the change and nodded at him.

  Then she went back to her programs, very aware of the silver feeder cup off to her left. The threat still existed; there was still a lot of work to do. She brought up the log on the zombie dart and a cry strangled her throat. Her tech’s failure had done more than crash the shield program. It had corrupted all her work to date on the dart. Almost twelve sweeps’ worth, useless.

  Heavy footsteps hurried her way. “Jorie?”

  She waved one hand at her blinking screen with an abrupt motion, not bothering to hide her frustration. “Gone. All gone. I have to start all over again on the dart.”

  “Christ. Well.” He huffed out a short sigh. “Just start over. It’s the only thing we can do.”

  She thrust her hands through her hair and leaned forward for a moment, wondering if that was true. She straightened. “We need another plan. We’re losing too much ground, Theo. I’m a tracker. I know survival programming and a bit more because I’ve made it my business to learn it. But I’m not part of a tech team. And this,” she motioned to her T-MOD and its auxiliary units, “may not hold together long enough, even if I figure out exactly what to do. We may have to just try to terminate the C-Prime without the dart and hope the herd collapses in on itself from there. And that the Tresh don’t take countermeasures.”

  The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced the feeder cup was a private message from Prow. The Devastator team might well be unaware he sent it. It didn’t fit their normal method of attack.

  So that meant the Devastators had yet to make another move against her. She was sure they would before the next zombie germination cycle completed.

  “Right now all we have is you, me, and Zeke.” Theo didn’t sound blissful. “A couple guys I talked to earlier this morning aren’t interested or available to go on a private hunting expedition. I’m still waiting on callbacks from a few others.”

  A couple more people? With herself as the only experienced tracker, even ten people would be a tough fight. “What if I met with your security chief, your regional leaders?” She tried to remember the terms from Danjay’s reports: major…mayor? And then some political figure over the larger populace. Meeting with a nil world’s heads of state was forbidden by gen-pro regs. She no longer cared about genpro regs.

  “It would have to go up through the chain of command, which could take weeks. And after that?” He shrugged. “You told me the horror stories, the governments fighting over access to the Guardians. It would all happen here. And you’d be at the center of it.”

  “We may not have a choice.”

  Theo’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not opting for that as long as we still have some options.” He pulled his cell phone—she’d finally learned the terminology for that thing—out of his pocket. “Let me try David Gray again.” He wandered back to the main room.

  Jorie returned to her programming, rebuilding the dart, very aware how outnumbered and ill-prepared they were. And even more aware there was nothing that could be done about it.

  A few minutes later Theo returned, hunkering down again with a glimpse of that feral grin on his lips. “David’s interested. I’ll need to get him to Suzanne’s to let him see the zombie. He knows—not what’s going on, not yet, but FDLE has reports on mummified bodies—zombie attacks—that my department wasn’t told about. The data wasn’t considered relevant to our queries because the attacks weren’t on people but on a whole herd of cows, up in Pasco County. Fifty or so.”

  “Cows.” She ran the word though her mind. “Ah. Cattle?” When he nodded, she continued. “Juveniles in a feeding frenzy will often attack anything warm-blooded. And this Pasco is a location?” Another nod. “How far?”

  “Twenty, thirty miles north—Wait, I’ll show you.” He left then returned with a fat paperbound book that had printed maps in the front.

  “Where exactly in the region?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll get the complete story from David when I meet with him at about three o’clock.”

  “He’ll accept what you tell him is true?”

  “He’ll consider the facts and come to the only conclusion he can. He’s a logical kind of guy—he worked SWAT at my department. Special Weapons and Tactics,” he explained.

  “Sniper?” She thought she understood the acronym.

  “Damned good one. Like I said, very logical, very calm.”

  Sniper training was good. How Theo’s friend would react when confronted with a problem from another star system remained to be seen.

  And she was still the only experienced tracker.

  “I want to see Tamlynne before we meet up with him,” she told Theo. She needed to hear a sentence in Alarsh. And she needed not to feel so alone.

  Theo never thought he’d see the day he’d willingly say, Hey, babe, let’s go shopping for clothes. But Jorie had to have something to wear besides her Guardian shorts and a Hawaiian print beach dress, and his T-shirts didn’t cut it. They may yet have to face his lieutenant or Chief Brantley. They may yet have to do any number of other things to solve this zombie problem, which would require her fitting in visually in Bahia Vista, and she didn’t.

  Even the Tresh woman had worn white jeans and a touristy T-shirt.

  Jorie, he knew, would look terrific in a pair of white jeans.

  Plus, he sensed a growing unhappiness in her and had no trouble listing the reasons. Top of the list had to be the fact she was stuck on his world. He was acutely aware he could have exercised more control and not slept with her so soon. Okay, they were both adults. But in spite of her training and all that Guardian crap she did, she was a woman and she’d been abandoned. He’d played on that, shamelessly, because he couldn’t stop wanting to touch her.

  It had been a long time since he’d seduced a woman—Camille had been a practiced tease. No seduction necessary. But with Jorie, for all that he’d rushed it once he sensed there might be a mutual attraction, he’d taken his time with small caresses, light kisses. He wore her down in inches. And added to her problems.

  So, hey, babe. Let’s go clothes shopping, pick up something for Tammy, then we’ll meet up with David Gray and talk about zombies covered by energyworms and Tresh Devastators with iridescent eyes.

  Just your average couple out for an afternoon. And all women loved to shop for clothes, didn’t they? Of course, going to T. J. Maxx the day after Christmas probably wasn’t the brightest idea.

  They managed to get her two pairs of jeans, a pair of black khakis, and some sweater and shirt combos that looked casual and covered her G-1. Tammy’s size was more of a guess, so they went with an unstructured tracksuit, workout pants, and a sweatshirt.

&nbs
p; “I didn’t realize,” she said, back in the SUV and buckling her seat belt, “that acquiring clothing was a body-contact sport here.”

  “We were amateurs up against professionals,” he told her, and backed out of the space.

  Her scanner was out. Anytime she was sure it wouldn’t be seen, she had it out. Looking for another Tresh safe house. There had to be more than the one in Gulfview. But she’d found none.

  He didn’t know if that was good or bad news. He only knew it worried her.

  Suzanne was home—her veterinary clinic operating on holiday hours this week—but Zeke was at the department. Theo would be too, in a couple of days. That worried him. If the zombie problem wasn’t solved, he didn’t discount that Jorie might go out on her own, find an abandoned house, work out of there. Not put him at risk.

  All the more reason they had to solve the problem now. Meeting with David was one more positive step.

  He left Jorie and Tammy alone in Suzanne’s guest bedroom and found Zeke’s wife in her home office at the other end of the house.

  “Telecommuting,” she said when he wandered in.

  He immediately felt bad. “I’m keeping you from what you should be doing.”

  “Not at all. Robin handled the routine cases this morning.” Robin was a bright, young veterinary intern that Suzanne hoped to groom as her partner. “No emergencies. No cats eating tinsel. Robin has off tomorrow and I’m handling the morning. We close at two all week.”

  Which was why he’d told David to meet him there at three.

  “How’s Tammy?”

  “Tammy is quite a remarkable young woman. I have to pinch myself over the fact she’s from another galaxy. She’s regained a lot of spunk in the past twenty-four hours. But there’s still amnesia over what happened at your house. Although Jorie says it could be artificially induced.”

  “Any nightmares last night?”

  “Not that Zeke or I heard. But I have caught her just staring sometimes, and then she shivers. When I touch her, she snaps out of it.”

  He’d seen Jorie do that too and told Suzanne.

  “Can you stop these people, Theo?” Suzanne’s eyes darkened. “I mean, here I am carrying on with my cats, dogs, parrots, and ducks as if nothing’s changed in the world. But everything has. If you can’t stop these Tresh and the zombies, what can we do?”

  He squeezed her shoulder. “We’ll stop them.” But could they? With every passing hour, things looked bleaker; Jorie, less confident. And with every passing hour, he was more and more reminded—as with his talk with Suzanne—of all the reasons, the people he had to fight for.

  He collected Jorie, accepted a surprise hug from Tammy, and, with Suzanne’s spare keys in his pocket, headed off to meet the man whom he hoped would be his planet’s newest recruit in the war.

  “Shee-it.” The former BVPD SWAT sniper and FDLE agent was from Texas and could draw that word out the way only a proper Texan could. Of medium height with dark-blond hair and blue-gray eyes, David Gray also looked like everyone’s idea of the nice guy next door.

  Theo had seen him in action during a few SWAT missions. Nice, unassuming David Gray was not a guy you’d want to piss off.

  David pointed to the dead zombie in Suzanne’s cold-storage locker. “You sure George Lucas didn’t build that thing?”

  “Yep. It was in my living room,” Theo told him. “Alive. It’s no special-effects puppet.”

  David’s gaze moved to Jorie. “It’s a baby zombie,” she told him. “The adult drones can get,” she closed her eyes briefly, “fifteen of your feet tall.”

  “Fifteen.” David nodded, looked down at the zombie, and rocked back on his heels.

  Theo tried to read his friend and failed.

  “And you say these are from another galaxy?”

  “Technically, no,” Jorie put in before Theo could answer. “This was probably bred here. But the original zombie, yes, that’s from the Chalvash System.”

  David wiped one hand over his face and turned to Theo. “If it was anyone but you, bud.”

  How often had he heard that in the past few days? “I wish it was anyone but me. This is not how I anticipated spending my vacation.”

  “And you shouldn’t be. This is a bigger problem than a few of us can handle. You know that.”

  “How well is anyone going to handle it when the news trucks and the crew from The Oprah Winfrey Show arrive? And then the subsequent wild rumors? Stock market will crash, people will start shooting their neighbors and looting the grocery stores. Perfect opportunity for some of those nutcase terrorists to make a move. We can prevent all that with a small but effective operation here.”

  “What’s to prevent these things from breeding more?”

  “They’d need a C-Prime, a controller zombie,” Jorie said. “If I can take that out with a reprogramming dart, the herd dies.”

  “I repeat. What’s to prevent someone from bringing another C-Prime here?”

  Theo looked at Jorie. He’d assumed their problems would be over with the death of this C-Prime. It never occurred to him that someone—the Tresh—might import others and that this was not a one-time thing.

  Jorie knotted her fingers together. “It would take at least a year by your calendar, given the location of the closest herd off-planet.”

  “A year.” David didn’t look happy. “And how do we stop them a year from now?”

  Jorie sucked in a deep breath. “If the Sakanah wasn’t destroyed, or if she managed to send a distress report, it’s possible the Guardians already have another ship on the way.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “Then there’s nothing you can do to stop the Tresh or the zombies except what I’m doing now: lure the C-Prime and terminate it.”

  “And who besides you knows how to do this?” David asked Jorie.

  Theo knew where he was going with this. He knew, moreover, how valid it was. He just didn’t like it. Damn David for being so damned logical!

  “At the moment, only me,” Jorie said. “The problem isn’t that I can’t teach you what a tracker does; I can. The problem is the MOD-tech that’s a necessary part of my job in tracking the zombies, in warning us about the Tresh, communicates only in Alarsh. My language. I can convert some to accept voice commands and basic displays in Vekran—English. But much of it I can’t.”

  David looked at Theo. “You try to do this alone, it’s a suicide mission.”

  “It is either way,” Theo countered. “There’s no way the state or the feds could move on this in four—max, six—days. You know that. We have to do something now. That means me, Jorie, and Martinez. If you feel you can’t, I understand. But that’s not going to stop the three of us from trying.”

  David paced over to the cold-storage locker and stared down at the zombie again. “Four,” he said, turning around. “Four of us. I don’t like it, Theo, but count me in.”

  23

  It took Jorie two and a half more days to finish constructing the zombie-reprogramming-dart virus. Or at least, as she viewed it, to do all she knew how to do. Her abilities in that area were mostly self-taught, as she told Theo more than once. They had to work with the possibility that the dart would do nothing. Then hard-termination of the C-Prime would be their only option. That meant it would take longer for the herd to fall apart. And that meant—during that time—more zombies could be born.

  It also gave the Tresh more time to counter their move. Which was why, when she wasn’t working on the virus dart or nestled in Theo’s arms, she put Theo through tracker training sessions. Gen-pro regs were history, as far as she was concerned. She told him—and trained him for—everything she could think of relative to the zombies and the Tresh.

  They’d heard nothing from the Tresh or Prow since the feeder cup appeared on Theo’s back porch. The lack of interruptions was good, certainly, but it only made her more nervous.

  “Like waiting for the other shoe to drop,” Theo had said over dinner earlier that evening.
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br />   Jorie had never heard the expression before, but it was appropriate.

  With the virus as complete as it was going to be, her next project was to modify one of the Hazers to carry the dart. “It’s not a physical object,” she explained to Theo when he sat beside her on the floor a few hours later, the spare Hazer’s stock open to expose its core databoard. “We call it a dart because it’s an encapsulated, self-executing program within the Hazer’s data energy stream.”

  “You’ve done this before?” he asked, as she worked on lining up her scanner’s infrared with the larger MOD-tech’s.

  “Not exactly.”

  “You’ve watched someone do it?”

  “Only in a sim.” Damn, damn! She couldn’t get the scanner to synch with the main tech. She swore in Alarsh.

  “I’m bothering you.”

  “No, I’m—” She wiped one hand over her face. Theo’s presence was actually calming. She truly seemed to worry less when he was around. “I’m tired. I should be doing this in the morning, when my eyes can focus.”

  “Good idea.” Theo brushed her bangs back from her face. “It’s after midnight.”

  “You talked to Martinez? Tamlynne?” She knew he did at least twice a day, but she needed the reassurance.

  “Tammy’s teaching the kitten to fetch balls of paper. Martinez has found two more incidents of what appear to be zombie attacks. No idea of when they occurred until we hear back from the ME’s office.”

  If they were recent, her scanners had picked up neither of them.

  “We’ll get up early,” Theo said. “We still have a couple days yet.”

  She knew they did. But she wanted to leave some time in case things went wrong. No, not in case. For when things went wrong.

  She put the disassembled spare Hazer carefully on the low table Theo had brought in for her to work on and rechecked the residence shields. “I’m shielding the door. If you need anything from your kitchen, get it now.”