The stairwell was once the model of moneyed beauty. The fancy carpet and ornate wooden banister had been ruined as the drone bumped and climbed its way to the upper floor.
All of them were on the ground floor in moments. Brandyweis continued out the front door without stopping. Liam followed.
When he exited the remains of the front door—
Hey, this reminds me of my house!
—he was rewarded with a sight that thrilled him.
The V-22 Osprey landed on the wide avenue between the row of mansions and the large municipal park beyond. It was bouncing lightly as if it had only just landed and wanted to get back off the ground.
“Run!” Someone shouted.
He wasn’t going to wait for an invitation. He crossed the lawn, easily pacing the larger, gear-clad Marines. As he approached, a woman in a small window near the front gave a thumbs up sign and then adjusted a huge gun on her door. The gun barrel began to spin and soon rounds tore into the mansion behind them as she traded fire with multiple drones pushing rounds the opposite way.
Zzzzzzzzzzzz.
A Gatling gun. The similarity to the destruction of his parents' house was uncanny.
While the gun screamed up front, they ran up the ramp on the rear. It was already going up as he reached the central cargo space. He also noticed people from the park had begun to run toward the plane...but he tried to keep that in perspective. If he successfully found a cure, all those people would be saved. More than could ever make it on one flight out.
Once they realized someone was shooting guns in their direction—the overshots of the drones—the whole procession stopped and dropped.
He was just able to reach a tie-down strap to hold on as the plane cleared the trees.
My God, that was close.
7
When he could take a breath, he appreciated how close he'd come to getting crossed off the list. His luck held, though as the big bird morphed from a helicopter into an airplane, he cussed into the rotor noise: he'd forgotten the handgun back in the tub.
He needed a list to keep track of all the expensive weapons he'd misplaced recently.
The Marines plugged him into the comm system so he could communicate with the Lt. Colonel without shouting. They discussed the assault, Elsa’s role, and what it could mean for their next mission. Liam remained focused on the one thing he could understand from all the new problems of the day.
“I need to find Victoria. We can't leave her.” He wondered if they were flying high above her, or if she was far away, or...dead.
He had to know.
On a whim, he said the first thing that came into his mind. “Hey, sir, do you think that machine will tell me where Victoria is? Is she in the tracking system?”
“I sincerely doubt it. It might know her name and information, but not her locale. She would have had to have been tagged, like you were. And if she was in Forest Park before you, the drones hadn’t made it that far west.”
“But they did make it. You just saw them.”
He thought it was so obvious it didn’t need saying, but he was determined to get them to use the computer to answer for certain.
In minutes, the Marine named Thomas—his name plate said Zinsky—brought the laptop-thing. He punched in a few keys, then took a minute to look at the screen. Liam couldn’t see what he was looking at.
After too long, Brandyweis asked him for a report.
“Well, sir. The kid said she was in Forest Park, but this is showing her several screens away. It shows her near Cairo, Illinois.”
“That’s not possible!”
She promised she wouldn’t leave me.
“Sir, I’ve checked the data. She's definitely there. But it also has her account flagged. You better see this.” He motioned for his superior to come to him.
Brandyweis got up from his seat and bent over to read the computer.
“You're sure about this?”
Liam could hear the colonel talk on the comm system.
Thomas nodded.
Brandyweis turned to him. “Son, this is saying your girlfriend was tagged before the disaster. The notes say she was admitted to a routine exam when she started working at Barnes Hospital. While she was there, this tag was inserted underneath her skin.
His mind spun. Duchesne said they tracked her by her phone. That was an easy lie for him to make. If he knew the tracking was more insidious, it didn’t cost him anything to blame it on the phone. But that would also mean he knew people were being tracked before the sirens got things started.
Would Victoria have any idea?
They can find us both, at any time.
Staying with Marines suddenly seemed the reasonable course of action. “Sir, I’ll follow you to the end of time if you can get me to Victoria in Cairo. If she left this park without telling me, I think she's in a lot of danger. The cure has to wait for this one thing.”
The plane rattled as the colonel stood nearby, studying him. He felt the harsh stare of the man now dictating the next phase of his life, but he met his eyes. There was no weakness when Victoria’s safety was on the line.
He needed the colonel. Desperately.
Chapter 6: Trust Issues
While Liam was asleep in the basement nearby.
Victoria was in the video control room of the Whitaker building on the Washington University campus of St. Louis. She’d just seen herself on a video recording set in her dorm room—someone had been spying on her.
“Vicky,” said a man’s voice behind her.
She was startled, but not afraid. She knew who it was and settled herself so as not to give him power over her.
“Hayes,” she said without emotion as she turned on her heels.
“Oh, I thought I’d surprise you. You look like you expected to find me here.”
“When I saw the elderly on the monitors, I thought of you. I had a feeling we’d see you again. I’m sorry it happened so soon.” Left unsaid was that Hayes had her shot in a previous meeting, though their most recent meeting was complicated—he’d helped her and Liam escape from the Riverside Hotel.
“Believe me; I wish this meet up didn’t need to happen, either. But the situation outside is dire, and it turns out I need your help.”
She turned her hip toward him. “You want to shoot me again? Here you go. I'm still healing, so it will really hurt.”
Hayes shook his head emphatically. “No, no, we have to get past that. I’ve said I was sorry, and I am.”
His contrition seemed genuine, as it did the last time, but she could never fully trust a man who had shot a gun at her, no matter the stakes.
“You need Grandma Marty. That’s why you're here.”
A long stare. “I don’t fault you for doubting me—”
“You need her. Just say it.”
He was a middle-aged man, now dressed in khaki pants and a light blue crisscrossed button-down shirt. He often seemed jovial in their prior encounters. Like he somehow enjoyed the chaos.
He rolled his eyes. “Fine. I need her.”
“A ha! Knew it.”
“I need her, but so do you. We all do.”
“Yes, great. Not surprising. But before we get to that, why were you spying on my room? Are you a sick pervert, in addition to being an attempted murder—oh, I’m sorry, we’ve moved beyond that incident,” she said with mock conviction.
Now he started to look like he was off balance. “No, it isn’t like that. I swear.” He pointed to the video screen now frozen on a still image of her old dorm room. “I don't have access to my old, um, tracking tools. That room is the only link I had to find you again. If you hadn’t come back, I might never have figured out where you’d taken Marty.”
“And nothing I did there was of any interest to you, other than finding me?”
“Why? What happened there?” he said with too-obvious curiosity.
She couldn’t tell if he knew, but he’d watched part of the tape because he’d used the name “Vick
y” which she yelled out when she thought she was totally alone in the room. That was bad enough. But her real fear was that he’d watched the entire tape.
Earlier in the day she and Liam had gotten involved romantically in her room, after several weeks together out in the wild. They both assumed they had the place to themselves and made good on that time alone. It was nobody’s business what they did, but standing in front of this video screen made something innocent seem tawdry and dirty. After her prior relationship disaster—summed up in that single word "Vicky," the intrusion hurt deeply.
“Just tell me how I can erase this tape. I’ll help you if I decide I agree with what you’re doing.”
“No questions asked?”
“Oh, nuh-uh. It doesn’t work like that. I’m going to ask lots of questions. I happen to know exactly where Grandma Marty is, but I’m going to guard her like my own Nana, for now. If you want to know where she is, the first step you’re going to need to take is to erase this tape.” It was her turn to point to the video screen of her room.
“Deal,” he said with his old charm. He went to fidgeting with the controls while she stood on and watched.
Maybe it was coincidence, and he intended to use the tape just to find her. But here he was in the control room at just the time she arrived, and he’d gotten her to agree to his terms. All he had to do was erase a tape he should never have had in the first place.
She sighed.
Was I just played?
Hayes stepped back. “Here, this button will erase that entire log. It’s been on a continuous feed, so you’ll erase the whole thing. Then I’ll turn it off.”
Studying the image, she tried to guess where the camera had been hidden. Her best guess was that it was in the closet at the back of the room. The view was through one of the slats on the metallic door.
“I’ll be destroying that camera when I get back there.”
He seemed hurt. “No, don’t do that.”
She held her hands on her hips, indignantly.
“I’m serious. Remove it, but don’t ruin it. The factory that made that camera is probably burning somewhere in China. They’ve been hit with this virus, same as us. If you destroy that piece of technology, there will never be another one like it. At least not for a very long time.”
“I thought you said you were working on a cure?”
He laughed quietly. “The last time we met, I believed we were on track to find a cure and save the remaining population. That’s true enough. But today, weeks later, I’m a little less enthusiastic about our ability to save human civilization.”
“Is that your job? Save civilization? Wasn’t it to spread a virus?”
He finally looked serious. “I deserve your scorn. I made the virus that was dropped on those marchers and hell was unleashed, rather than just giving some politician a victory. But I told you before; I’m a changed man now. I’m trying to end this disaster before it wipes mankind and his civilization off the Earth, forever. After everything I’ve seen, the race now is to save the former. The latter is already gone.”
“And so you tracked me down to help with that.”
“Honest. Let me show you what I’ve been doing here.”
He led her out of the control room, and down the steps.
2
“Don’t,” she said quietly.
Hayes had walked up to the double doors of the room where she’d earlier witnessed the zombies walking among the test subjects.
He turned to her while at the door. “Don’t worry; this is a controlled experiment.” She could just make out the smile in the low light. But when he turned back around, a zombie was at the window. Hayes jumped.
“Oh shit!”
He stumbled back a few steps before regaining control.
“They’re never at the door.”
“I might have riled them up,” she offered. They had scared her in much the same way before she left to go upstairs.
“Yeah, well, it’s all good. We’ll just have to look around that one.”
He moved back to the door, and she stayed close, but behind him. She didn’t trust him not to open the door and toss her in. That would make a fun “experiment,” she was sure.
The blood-soaked zombie hovered, but as she got a better look at him—he was dressed in hospital scrubs—she noticed he wore the equivalent of a bridle. A strap wrapped around his head, and a thick piece of leather or another material was wedged tightly into its mouth, so it was prevented from closing its jaw. It couldn’t bite a banana, much less skin.
“When I was here, I saw these zombies walking through those people in the beds. People I knew during the day, today. I watched over one of them, only to find out they were being abused at night by this sick prank.”
He turned back to her. “Prank? This isn’t a prank. Far from it. We’re witnessing the first zombies not to attack humans when they have the chance. Those people in there are alive.”
With a nod to the window, he continued. “Look inside. Those people are fine. It’s the zombies who are different.”
As instructed, she checked it out. The closest zombie was an unwelcome distraction, but its behavior was a far cry from the violence and attacks always associated with them. Still, it was pawing at the door.
But, sure enough, there were other zombies walking the room, and while they seemed to make circuits around the beds of patients, they did not attack them.
“It’s a sick experiment. How are you allowed to do this?”
“I still have my resources. I had the University stand down from guarding this place, so I could be assured I could conduct these tests in private. They give me people suspected of being infected, and I send them back people I know are clean. Everyone wins.”
She peered into the room, wondering if the people lying in the beds would agree with him. Unaccountable testing was a nightmare scenario for an ethical nurse or doctor. Her impulse was to go in there and kill the zombies and release the victims.
“Do you see any patterns?” he asked matter-of-factly.
“Should I?”
“Just watch them.”
She took a few minutes to study them. The zombies on patrol did move around to all parts of the room, but if they were making any patterns, she couldn’t see them. Sometimes the zombies would appear to stop, or make slow, deliberate reversals of direction, but as far as she could deduce, they weren’t doing anything in a pattern.
“I don’t see anything unusual, beyond zombies not attacking them.”
“Hmm. I’m disappointed. You seemed pretty sharp,” he said with mock sadness.
“Just tell me.”
He strode away from the door, heading back up the steps.
“This way, please. Keep up.”
In moments, back in the video room, Hayes keyed in some data and the room below appeared on the screen. The camera was on infrared, so the low light was not a factor.
The images were from a previous time frame. The tell was that the zombie at the door was walking the room, rather than looking for intruders.
“OK, watch again from this camera angle. You should see it.”
Minutes went by as she watched.
She tried to think of something to say that would sound intelligent, but by all appearances, the movements were completely random.
“Nothing?”
She remained silent.
“Let me speed it up.” He pressed some buttons, and the image sped into high gear. With the advantage of speed, the pattern became stunningly obvious.
“They always move to the same spots.”
“Exactly! Though the movements seem to be random, they spend extra time at a select few of the people. And what do you think they have in common? Take your time.”
She watched in awe as the pattern continued to scream at her. It was almost embarrassing that she’d missed it earlier. It was like the zombies hovered at those waypoints and either turned around or lingered just a bit longer than they should. But while patte
rn screamed at her now, she couldn’t deduce the point of commonality among those particular victims.
Thinking back to her day, she recalled the root cause of why those people were in the room in the first place. Something that might explain everything.
“They're infected?”
After a dramatic delay, Hayes looked at her and gave her the thumbs up sign. He was also transfixed by the pattern. Finally, he pulled himself away and looked at her. “Yes, sorry. You got that one right. High marks for you, after all. We’ve figured out that the docile zombies search out other zombies, but because they’re being affected by the trial vaccine, they seem to get confused when they run into them. That’s the hesitation you see. But, given enough time, say an entire night in a controlled environment, we can tell who has been infected.”
“But what does that prove? We already know who’s infected. Like, almost everyone!”
“Ah, but that’s the part you’re missing, here. Those people are infected with the virus, but they aren’t displaying symptoms. They’re carriers, but they don’t spread the disease in any way we can tell.”
“Typhoid Mary’s.”
“Yes, that’s an apt comparison, but Mary Mallon didn't care if she was infected. She knowingly spread Typhoid despite repeatedly causing death and destruction in her wake. These people have no way of knowing they were infected. We ask all kinds of questions when they were ‘volunteered’ for this quarantine system. We can’t find anything that ties them all together. Nothing that says how they were all infected.”
“Or why.”
“Yes, or why. But you can see our problem, can’t you? I mean humanity’s problem.”
She thought of all the people huddled together in the park, waiting as refugees for the world to recover so they could go back out and rebuild. Some percentage of them could already be infected, and no one in the world could pick them out of a crowd.
Except Hayes. That figures.
3
“So the whole thing with Grandma and the elderly people you killed was just a sideshow so you could walk these zombies among the living and find these carriers?”
Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 6): Zombies Ever After Page 11