Michael smiled. “How can I argue with that?”
_______
Abraham and Reed watched the helicopter fly over the search team as they moved out for the second day of looking for Anderson.
Reed chuckled. “If they haven’t found him by now…”
He turned and walked over to the map of the area on the office wall. Looking at it, he surmised, “I think he made it to Trudeau before the first search team was sent out. He could make the ten miles in twenty minutes easily. They all assumed he would go to ground in the woods. I think he’s in the city and is going to cause some major damage!”
Abraham looked concerned. “So why don’t you get some assets into the city to suss him out?”
Reed smiled again. “Why would we want to do that, Eli? This is the perfect situation. We want all the attention somewhere else while we work out our deals with the clients I arranged.”
There was a tap at the door, and Michael came in. “We have a problem, gentlemen. Teeny is alive.”
Abraham was incredulous. “What? How?”
Reed slapped the desk in front of him. “How do you know this, Tanner?”
Michael looked back and forth between them, now showing a little doubt. “Well, she texted Marty.”
He turned white then as he realized he had just signed his lover’s death warrant. “No. I’m sure Marty didn’t know anything about it. I erased the conversation from his phone. He won’t know.”
Reed shook his head. “No. He is aware she is alive. She wouldn’t have tried to contact him otherwise. Michael, he had to be the one who helped her escape!”
Michael had tears in his eyes now. He had been too busy thinking about how Teeny had escaped and how they would find her to realize that he was putting Marty’s life in danger.
“N…no. He wouldn’t…”
Abraham walked over and put his hand on Michael’s shoulder. “He’s a traitor to us, Michael. How far will he take it?”
Michael was crying in earnest now. “What are you going to do?”
Abraham started to speak, but Reed cut him off with a gesture. “We need him to bring Teeny to us, Michael. In fact, it makes sense now about Lieutenant Hardt leaving the compound to go into the city so often. Where are O’Reilly and Laudner?”
Michael brushed the tears from his eyes. “They were working with the search parties, but they’re feeling sick now. Both are showing signs of the Anderson virus. Marty discovered rabies in their blood, and they aren’t showing any kind of recovery from the RabAvert injections. Currently they’re locked up in the habitats.”
Reed walked over to the window and contemplated. “Didn’t the lieutenant also get scratched by Anderson?”
Abraham and Michael walked over to the window to look out with him.
“When is he due back?” Reed asked.
Abraham shrugged. “He doesn’t check in with us.”
Reed tapped his chin a few times. “We need to get rid of all of them.”
Michael and Abraham both looked at him with shocked looks and Abraham replied incredulously “Everyone? Sorry?”
Reed stared back at him.
“How are we going to make that happen?”
Reed just turned back to the window. “You let me worry about that.”
Michael’s eyes opened wide as he stared at the floor and then out the window. He was sad but wouldn’t hesitate to let him go. His life depended on it.
_______
Rocky was standing on the train headed south toward Washington, DC. She had had to wait in Grand Central for hours before she could fit onto this one. There were massive crowds headed down to participate in the march. She heard conversations all around her that told about how bad the situation had become. Doctors, nurses, pharmacy workers all out of work because of the biggest miracle for mankind since life itself had started. Talk about bittersweet to the extreme!
A couple next to her were talking about a phenomenon that they called the “wandering dead.” According to them, they had witnessed people who should be dead actually walking around. This sparked a memory of her travel to the train station. There had been people whom she had assumed were homeless bums wandering into the street reaching for pedestrians, who were giving them a wide berth. How could this be? When you’re dead, you lie down and your spirit leaves you to give you peace. She had a sudden realization that when she was ready to die, she wanted to actually die! She plugged her headphones into her ears and turned up the music. She didn’t want to hear any more of the conversations.
_______
The commuter trains weren’t any better in DC. It took her another five hours to get to the Monuments Mall. When she did arrive, there were so many people that she could hardly move toward the Capitol Building. There were television trucks everywhere. The crowd was so immense that news reporters had to stand on top of their vans with bright lights lighting up everything around them.
Her friend had texted her that she was in front of the Library of Congress. It would take some time to get there. National Guard and DC cops were among the crowd, but it was obvious that if anything happened, they wouldn’t be able to do much about it.
She was close to one of the news trucks and could hear the reporter, so she stopped to listen.
“Hello America! This is Katlin Telurite reporting to you here in the National Monument Mall in Washington, DC. The Million-Doctor March has grown to more than three million!”
She saw the cameraman start to pan around the crowd.
“As you can see, there are so many people, we can’t even make room for our crew. Standing on top of our truck, you can see that making it anywhere here is a challenge. We are told that similar turnouts have happened in major cities around the world. The Vatican in Rome and Buckingham Palace in London have similar-sized crowds. Many gatherings have turned violent. People are angry about the world’s economy crashing. Half the population of earth is headed for poverty status. Rioting and looting are running rampant throughout urban populations. Here, we are waiting for Congress to announce the decision on the Mercy Act. We should hear something within the hour. You can feel that the tension is as taut as guitar string. Jaff, there is really only one decision they can make here. Any other will cause this crowd to explode into a bonfire!”
“Thanks, Katlin. Let’s hope that the answer is a good one. You be careful out there.
“Kenny, how are we looking with Claudette?”
Rocky shook her head and kept moving toward the library.
THE WANDERING DEAD
Rocky wasn’t making much progress. It had been two hours of pushing and pulling toward the library. She had made this walk before, and it was ten minutes, tops, on any other day.
The announcement from Congress was supposed to be more than an hour ago. People were monitoring the news through social media and streaming live newscasts. Helicopters were not allowed this close to the political center of the country, but many small drones with cameras were hovering over the crowd. She spotted one of the operators and got a glimpse of the immense crowd from above. It was a spectacular achievement by the organizers to get this many people into one place.
The operator turned the camera to a podium at the top of the stairs leading to the front doors of the Capitol Building. National Guard soldiers and DC cops were starting to push people back from it, forming a line to keep a perimeter, with a dozen Secret Service agents posted around the podium.
Congressman Joe McDowell—people called him Joe Mac—stepped up to the microphones. He was Speaker of the House and known to be a brazen opponent of the president. About a dozen other senators and representatives gathered behind him, all of them cronies in the same political party.
When he patted the air with his hands, the crowd of millions did the impossible and went silent enough that you could hear the hundreds of clicking cameras and a few shouted questions from the pres
s corps.
“Thank you all for coming out today. I know that you all have been waiting on a decision on the Mercy Act.”
That brought a cheer from the crowd, which the congressman once again patted down. After about sixty seconds, it was quiet enough for him to speak again.
“After long hours of debate—and points on both sides of the issue were considered—we have not come to a satisfactory agreement. We will continue our debate when we return from the fall break in two weeks.”
The crowd sucked in their breath like someone getting ready to blow out a candle. Then there was a buzzing sound, hundreds of thousands of person-to-person conversations. Like waves, the buzzing got louder. The congressmen realized the trouble they were in now and turned to start jogging toward the doors of the Capitol Building. The Secret Service was following and trying to look in every direction at the same time.
The buzz rose to a roar. The crowd surged toward the single line of soldiers and cops. They were pushed back easily. You could hear the clacking of riot batons hitting the tops of their shields and the heads of the now-enraged crowd. When the soldiers started going down under the human tsunami, you could hear the assault rifle gunfire echo off of the surrounding buildings.
Rocky heard screaming all around her. There were screams of anger, screams of pain, and screams of the dying. People were being trampled by the surging throngs of protesters. She almost went down several times, clawing at shirts and arms to stay standing. She squeezed between two full-on fights. Who knew why they were fighting each other? Maybe they were Democrats and Republicans with different views of the day’s results. Once by them, she spotted two huge men pushing their way through the crowd toward the library, and she tucked in behind them close enough to ride their wave.
Moving up the steps, she looked to where Margot had said she would be waiting. There were bodies everywhere. Looking in the doors, she could see hundreds of people ransacking the library. She turned back toward the mall and looked out over an apocalyptic scene. Thousands of people were still running around among what had to be hundreds of thousands of bodies littering the ground. She could see dozens of vehicles flipped over and burning. One exploded as she started to move back toward the edge of the steps. Ducking away from it, she noticed a body with blond hair face down on the stairs. She moved over to it and flipped it over to see her friend Margot’s face. She gasped at the sight of her face with a large part of her cheek missing from a bullet. A second had gotten her in the upper chest. She screamed to the sky and cradled her friend in her arms while she threw her head back and sobbed.
The sight of her friend drained what was left of her energy. Tears ran down her face as she sat and watched people run by to who knows where. She was sure they didn’t even know where they were going. They were just running to somewhere other than here. Some ran past with armfuls of precious tomes that they had pilfered from the library. As she watched one of them jog by, she felt a tug on her arm. She looked down at her friend with half a face staring back up at her and pulling her arm toward her gaping mouth. The arm was in the mouth with the teeth starting to bear down to take a bite when she instinctively yanked it away.
Margot then rolled over to a kneeling position to crawl closer. Rocky started to crab crawl backward away from her leering eyes and clacking teeth. Margot lunged and grabbed her pants at the knee and got a grip with both hands. Rocky pushed at her head and grabbed her hair to prevent the inevitable bite.
Then she saw a boot come out of nowhere, and a dull thud sent Margot’s head whipping backward. The force caused her to roll away from Rocky’s leg as she took a couple more crab crawl strides back. The man with the boot stepped forward and stomped hard on Margot’s head. There was the sound of bones crunching and a sickening squish. Rocky threw her arm over her face as if to fend off the horrible scene. A large man in a black T-shirt with an angry look on his face immediately took huge strides straight at her. She ducked her head behind her arm and screamed, but he went right over the top of her to give another man a forearm smash to the face. The man fell backward to the cement with a sound that was like a watermelon hitting the ground. The soldier stepped forward and stomped him to death too.
She was so stunned, he could have calmly walked over and done the same to her without a fight. He had blond hair in a crew cut atop a muscular body and tanned face with a nose that looked like it had been broken every day of his life. She stared at him while trying to gather her thoughts about what was happening. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t quite place him. She didn’t have any military friends—and that rang a bell. She suddenly remembered a picture her friend Teeny had sent her.
“Tin?”
The big man smiled broadly. “Close but no cigar!”
He walked over and offered a hand up. She couldn’t move. He pushed his hand closer. “You need to get the fuck up, or one of them chompers is going to have you for dinner!”
That was when she looked around and saw thousands of wandering people grabbing injured and helpless people on the ground and ripping them to pieces, pulling handfuls of flesh to their mouths and sucking the blood from them before reaching to grab more. She felt dizzy and almost passed out.
The man reached down and slapped her across the face. “Get the fuck up so we can get the fuck out of here!”
Holding her stinging face with one hand, she grabbed his offered hand with the other and let him pull her up. They started running away from the epicenter of the carnage. As he dragged her along, she looked back toward the Capitol Building to see clouds of black smoke rising above every building around the mall and the spotted the yellow lights of National Guard vehicles moving across what could only be described as a battlefield.
They jogged through the streets without saying a word. He had let go of her hand after looking at her and nodding an “Are you OK now?” signal, which she returned with a hesitant “I think so” nod. He needed hands, arms, and feet to continue the defense as they made their way toward the area of the White House. As easy as it was for him to pound their attackers, he still got scratches and bites on his arms and hands.
He was huge, maybe six foot five or six, and three feet wide. Teeny had described Tin as this size. She was very confused, but they had no time to have that conversation now. So she concentrated on watching for wanderers and keeping up with him.
As they moved through the streets, she looked up and got a sudden feeling of dread as a huge black cloud came into view above the historic home of the presidential family—the second time in its history that it would burn. The big man looked up and saw the same thing and stopped. He looked at her with a lost look. He didn’t know what to do next. The plans he had were obviously to get to someplace safe. The White House was that plan.
There were scattering people and the wandering dead everywhere. A vehicle was not an option. The streets were just too clogged with honking cars and trucks that were getting nowhere fast. The wanderers were gathered around those cars and trucks, trying to get to those living people inside.
It was her turn to grab his hand and get moving again. They ran down a side street and saw houses with doors wide open and some actually burning. They came within half a block of a house that had hundreds of the wanderers outside clawing at the doors and windows. A man on the second floor was screaming for help that he wouldn’t be getting for quite some time.
The big man shook his head. “Hope he went shopping recently.”
She was nodding. “No shit. Right!”
“I don’t think trying to hunker down is a great idea in the city!”
“I agree wholeheartedly!”
He turned to her then. “What’s your name, beautiful?”
“Raquel Vaughn. My friends call me Rocky.”
The big man gave a wide smile at that.
“Why do you look like my friend’s new boyfriend?”
“Well, Rocky, you found the bet
ter looking bookend! Jaxson Hardt! You can call me Jax.”
“No time for pleasantries now. I think we should get as far from this shit hole of a city as possible. What happened to your gun, Jax?”
He actually blushed. His eyes puffed up and darted from side to side. “Uh, I lost it during the original scuffle. I’m lucky, I guess. Rioters were killing anyone in a uniform with a gun! That’s why I took off the rest of my uniform too!
“Actually I owe my life to some of the walking corpses. People who were looking to take me down had to defend themselves against wanderers, and I was able to run away.”
“I don’t suppose you have any other weapons?”
He pulled out a pocketknife and opened it up with a smile.
She smirked and shook her head. “So no real weapons.”
He gave her a half shrug and a weak smile.
She rolled her eyes. “Well, I guess lucky for me too. I was almost a lunchtime snack in the mall. Thanks for that.”
He smiled and shrugged again.
They turned and started jogging down an empty street headed south to see if they could get across the bridge before it got overrun.
MERCY
Tin peeked around the corner where the pharmacy was and saw that there weren’t any more wanderers. With a fire ax in hand now, he moved down the hallway with Teeny in tow.
They moved through the hospital methodically, clearing rooms on the first floor and locking the outer doors to make sure they stayed cleared. Tin looked through the morgue doors’ round windows. Eight wanderers were shambling around as if they had someplace to go but had forgotten where. When Teeny came up behind him, they all turned their heads and poked their noses in the air as if they could smell that living flesh was close. Tin grabbed a chair and wedged it under the handles to hold the doors shut. They would come back to take care of these after clearing the rest of the hospital.
They moved through the rest of the hospital without incident. It was abandoned. All of the people must have just dropped everything and walked out after finding out about the collapse of the industry.
Origin Z Page 15