by John Ringo
“Especially ’cause there were only three shots. Total.” Proudly, almost possessively, she squeezed the big shoulder of the man sitting in the wheelchair in front of her. “Papa’s really good, Mama. One shot, one kill.”
So it was “Papa” now. That was okay with Andy. She wasn’t really surprised. In a catastrophe like this one, when people had their friends and families ripped into shreds right in front of them, it was only human nature for people to make new attachments wherever they could.
Truth be told, she was feeling pretty motherly toward the girl herself.
Grand-motherly, rather. Her days of dealing with the messy business of raising her own children were long behind her.
That memory brought a moment’s anguish. Their son George didn’t live anywhere nearby. George and his wife Janny weren’t even in the country, since George’s company had sent him off to Brazil for a couple of months to handle some sort of problem that had come up in their operations down there. That was the reason she and Tom had been taking care of their grandson Jack over the summer.
Their daughter Rita was long gone, killed in a car accident fifteen years earlier. She’d had no children of her own, and since her husband had never gotten along with Andy and Tom, they no longer had any contact with their daughter’s step-children either.
She’d tried to reach George on her cell phone, even though Andy wasn’t sophisticated in the use of cell phones for international calling. Eventually she’d asked Rochelle to help. But while the restaurant manager did know how to do it, she hadn’t been able to make any connections either.
Which was not all that surprising, of course. As her grandson Jack like to say, zombie apocalypse, remember?
* * *
About an hour later, Ceyonne Bennett’s father Jerome showed up. He’d gotten in touch with Ceyonne via cell phone and she’d told them where they were.
Still in uniform—he’d probably slept in the damn thing—he slowly drove his police car into the tank farm until he came to a stop below them and perhaps twenty yards away from the tank they were on. By then, Ceyonne was halfway down the staircase, shouting “Dad! Dad!” For all the girl’s grousing on the subject of her pig-headed and unreasonable father, she was obviously very attached to him.
Andy wasn’t sure what had happened to the mother. Jack had told her that Ceyonne had told him that her mother had run off with a traveling salesman, but Andy was sure the girl had just been pulling his leg. That story had all the earmarks of a tall tale. Did traveling salesmen even exist anymore? She didn’t think so—not the kind that went door-to-door and talked to people, anyway, as opposed to so-called “sales reps.”
Before Ceyonne reached the bottom of the stairs, her father was backing up and waving her off. “Don’t come near me, Ceyonne! Get back up on the tank.” When the girl hesitated, he shouted, “Do it now. Don’t fool with me, dammit!”
“What’s the matter, Dad?”
He shook his head. “I’m sick. Feels like a flu—but I doubt if it is. I’m pretty sure I got infected with the zombie virus.”
By then, Rochelle Lewis had started down the stairs. Seeing her come, Jerome Bennett said, “You’re the manager of the Indiana Restaurant, aren’t you? I’ve eaten there a few times.”
“Yes, I am. Name’s Rochelle Lewis.”
He nodded. “Pleased to meet you. Do us both—do us all—a favor and keep my daughter up there with you. Do not let her come down here.”
Exactly how Rochelle Lewis was supposed to restrain a teenage girl who was half a head taller than she was and outweighed her by at least thirty pounds, was not very clear.
But Ceyonne had stopped on her own, still a good fifteen feet off the ground. “Dad!” she cried out. The sound was a sheer wail.
He shook his head again. “There’s nothing either of us can go about it, girl. It’s the way it is. I just came by to say good-bye.”
“Dad!”
Andy was at the top of the stairs, now. She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted down to the police officer. “Where d’you plan to go, Jerome?”
He shrugged. “Home, I guess.”
She shook her head. “Stay here. You may just have a normal flu, you know? And even if you got the zombie virus, some people survive it—I mean, don’t get turned into…well, monsters.”
Jerome made a face. “I’ve been briefed on the odds. We got a notification from the CDC in Atlanta. There’s two stages to the disease. Stage One—that’s what I think I got—just seems like a bad flu. Ninety-five percent of people survive it, but then they come down with Stage Two of the virus. That’s the zombie stage. Twenty percent will die right off, and of the eighty percent who survive, almost all of them will turn into zombies. There’s a few who don’t, who survive both stages, but it’s not more than ten percent.”
Tom had wheeled himself to the top of the staircase. “Those are still better odds than pancreatic cancer, Jerome.”
The policeman laughed humorlessly. “They measure cancer survival rates by a five-year standard. The zombie virus is all over, one way or another, within a few weeks. Three weeks, the CDC says, to run its whole course. Not even a month.”
“Better still,” said Andy. She pointed at one of the storage tanks next to their own, about forty yards away. “Get yourself up there and we’ll see what happens. At least that way, if you do survive, you got people right here to keep an eye on you.”
“And an eye out for you,” added her husband. He pointed to a different storage tank, next to the one she’d indicated. “But go up on that one. I can see the whole staircase so even if you’re out of commission ’cause of the disease I can take out any zombie tries to climb up and get you.” He lifted the Remington off his lap and brandished the rifle. In its own way, the gesture was rather dramatic.
Jerome looked at him for a moment, then looked at the storage tank. “I don’t have any supplies,” he said. “Not even anything to sleep on.”
“We’ll bring what you need down to you,” said Andy. “But get back in the car and drive off a ways, will you? We don’t know how far that virus can travel, if you have it.”
Fortunately, Bennett hadn’t parked near the bottom of the staircase. So after they put together a couple of bundles for him—one holding enough food to keep him going along with a walkie-talkie, and the other a sleeping bag and a small two-person tent—his daughter Ceyonne and Rochelle Lewis carried the bundles down the staircase and set them on the ground about halfway between their storage tank and the own that Bennett would be using. By then, the cop had moved the squad car still further away and was waiting by it until they finished. He was now carrying a shotgun to go with the pistol at his hip. He had a bag holding something heavy, too. That was probably ammunition for the two weapons, Andy figured.
Soon enough, Rochelle and Ceyonne were back on their tank roof and Jerome was setting up his tent on the neighboring roof. He was close enough that, if need be, he and his daughter could communicate by shouting, but as long as the cell phones stayed operational they’d do far better. So would the walkie-talkies, when—nobody thought it was going to be “if”—the cell phones stopped working.
Unlike the tents on the first roof—which Jack Kaminski had taken to calling “Alpha Tower”—the one Jerome Bennett would occupy wasn’t attached in any way to the storage tank. But although no one said it out loud, everyone thought that was a moot point. If he survived the virus, Jerome wouldn’t be moving around much for at least a week. His own weight would keep the tent from being blown off the roof.
And if he didn’t survive—or, worse, turned into a zombie—he made arrangements to handle that as well.
He’d had his daughter provide him with Tom Kaminski’s cell phone number, which he called as soon as he got the tent set up.
“You said you’d shoot any zombie who tried to climb up the staircase,” the policeman said.
“That’s right,” replied Kaminski. “Even if I’m asleep, we’ll always have someone—two som
eones, in fact—on guard at all times. They’ll keep an eye on your tower too.”
“I’m not worried about that. What I really need to know, Mr. Kaminski, is if you’re up to the job of shooting a zombie who’s trying to get down from this roof. That zombie would be me, you understand. Or what used to be me.”
Tom hesitated. He hadn’t given that problem any consideration at all. Stalling for time, he said, “Please. Call me Tom.”
“I come out of this alive and still human, I’ll call you Tom. For the time being, though, I think ‘Mr. Kaminski’ works better. And you didn’t answer my question.”
Tom could see Ceyonne staring at him. The expression on her face was both anxious and fearful. The girl might have a brash personality, but she was plenty bright enough to have figured out why her father had wanted to talk to Tom Kaminski.
Tom sighed. “Yes, Mr. Bennett. If it becomes necessary, I’ll…take care of it.”
“Thank you. If you can manage it, shoot me when my daughter’s not looking. But don’t take any real risks. I’d a lot rather she had PTSD from watching her dad get killed than become a zombie herself.”
Tom would talk to Eddie Haywood about that. He’d make sure the kid understood that if the time came, his job was to make sure that Ceyonne didn’t see it happen.
After Bennett got off the phone, it dawned on Tom that there was another problem—and one that would be a lot more intractable. If the cop did turn zombie and Tom had to shoot him, what in God’s name would they do with the body? Whether Tom shot him on the roof or while he was coming down the stairs, the naked and slaughtered body of Ceyonne’s father would be visible to the girl any time the sun was up.
For weeks—because they couldn’t take the risk of sending someone over to bury the man, for fear of being contaminated with the virus.
“Hell’s bells,” he muttered.
Quietly, making sure Ceyonne wasn’t around to hear, he raised the problem with his wife and Freddy Rodriguez.
Freddy came up with the best answer—not a good one; not even close, but the best they could manage. He’d weld together a jury-rigged grappling hook which they’d attach to one of their ropes. Then, if the time came, they’d toss it onto Bennett’s corpse from a distance. Freddy figured he could manage the feat from at least ten or fifteen yards away. Once the grappling hook was embedded in the body, they’d attach the other end of the rope to one of the pickups and just haul the corpse out of sight.
“And what if the hook comes out?” Andy demanded. “You can’t retrieve it and try again or you might get contaminated.”
Freddy ran fingers through his hair. “We’ll just have to make up another grappling hook.”
“And hope we don’t run out of rope,” said Tom.
* * *
Around noon the following day, another caravan of vehicles came into the tank farm. It was a smaller group than their own, just two pickups and a minivan, and clearly not as well equipped.
The three vehicles drove up to Alpha Tower—by now, everyone was using Jack’s name for the tank—and a man got out of the driver’s side of the leading pickup. He was somewhere in early middle age, anywhere between his mid-thirties and mid-forties, and clearly Hispanic, but Andy couldn’t tell if he was Puerto Rican or Mexican, either by birth or ancestry. In that part of Lake County, he could just as likely be either one. He might be from somewhere in Central America, too, but that was less common.
“Hello, up there!” he shouted. “I’m Bob Vasquez.” He pointed a finger at the woman she could see sitting in the passenger seat. “That’s my wife Rosie.” He now pointed with his thumb over his shoulder. “Behind us are our two daughters and their families.”
He had no accent at all, beyond the clipped nasal one shared by millions of people in the Chicago area, which meant he was probably native-born rather than an immigrant. Not that Andy cared either way. She’d met some individual exceptions, of course, but by and large she got along fine with Hispanic folks, wherever they came from.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Andy. “I’m Andrea Kaminski and this”—Tom had rolled up his wheelchair by then—“is my husband Tom. The rest of the people up here are our neighbors. Where you from?”
“Hessville, me and Rosie.” That was a neighborhood in Hammond not far from the tank farm. “Our daughter Leticia and her husband Jim come from there too, and our other daughter Teresa and her kids live—well, used to—in Hegewisch.”
Hegewisch was a neighborhood of south Chicago just across the state line, about a fifteen minute drive away. Not surprisingly, they were all local people.
“Our son-in-law saw you up here yesterday while he was driving by, and we talked it over and decided this was probably the safest place around. Is there any chance we can join you?”
Andy’s decision came instantly, which meant that she must have been chewing on the problem somewhere on the back of her mind without realizing it.
“Yes and no. You’re welcome to set yourselves up on one of the other storage tanks here, Mr. Vasquez. But—I’m sorry, it’s just medical necessity—we can’t let you come up onto ours. Nothing personal. It’s just we got no way of knowing if any of you has been infected by the zombie virus. The symptoms don’t show up right away.”
Jerome Bennett joined the conversation from his own roof top. Apparently, he was still well enough to do so.
“She’s right,” he said, half-shouting. “I’m Jerome Bennett, with the East Chicago police department. We got a notification from the CDC—”
“What’s that?” asked Rosie Vasquez. She’d come out of the pickup and joined her husband.
“Centers for Disease Control,” explained Jerome. “They’re based in Atlanta and they’re more-or-less the national public health service. Anyway, one of the things they told us was that it takes three to seven days after you’ve been infected before the first symptoms show up. So one of you could already be sick and no one knows it yet including them.”
He pointed to the people on Alpha Tower. “For that matter, one of them could be infected too. This is for your protection as well as theirs.”
Bennett now pointed at himself with his thumb. “I’m almost sure I’ve gotten infected, which is the reason I’m up on this tank roof by myself even though my daughter’s over there.” He lowered his hand and shrugged. “It’s cruddy, but there it is.”
The Vasquez couple looked at each. Rosie said something too quietly for Andy to hear, and her husband nodded.
“Okay!” he said, looking back up at them. “Any suggestions as to which tank we should pick?”
Tom lifted his rifle and used it to point at a tank that was next to theirs but some distance away from Jerome’s. It was also, Andy noted, a tank that had a spiral staircase that was within view of the people on Alpha Tower. She was quite sure that was one of the reasons Tom had selected it—just as she was quite sure he wasn’t using the rifle as a pointer by accident. It wasn’t subtle, no, but it was a way of making sure the Vasquezes knew they were armed without directly making any threats.
Partly to allay any antagonism that the sight of the rifle might have created but mostly just because she thought it was a good idea, Andy got one of the walking talkies and tossed it down to Bob Vasquez.
“You know how to use it?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m familiar with them.” He pulled a cell phone out of his pocket. “These are still working, though.”
“Yeah—but for how long? But since they are for the moment, what’s your phone number?”
After Vasquez gave it to her, she called him from her own cell phone just to get her number registered.
Which was a waste of time, because less than ten minutes later all the cell phones stopped working.
* * *
By mid-afternoon, the Vasquezes had gotten set up on the tank that Jack solemnly informed them was “Gamma Tower.” (He’d already bestowed “Beta Tower” on Jerome Bennett’s new domicile.)
“Why ‘Gamma’?” asked one
of Teresa’s two boys. His name was Tony Ramirez and he looked to be about eleven years.
“We’re naming ’em after the Greek alphabet,” Jack explained, just as solemnly.
“Why?”
Jack spent the next several minutes in a long-winded and convoluted explanation that basically came down to “Because.” Young Tony still seemed dubious of the logic but he didn’t pursue it any further.
4
The big oil refinery in Whiting blew up just before daybreak the next morning. The initial blast was enough to wake everyone up, and even if it hadn’t been the series of rolling explosions that followed over the next hour or so would probably have awakened the dead.
It certainly woke up all the zombies in the area—probably all the zombies within a fifteen mile radius. Using the binoculars and the scope on Tom’s rifle, they could see dozens of naked figures moving rapidly in the direction of the refinery.
By then, there was a huge column of smoke rising above the refinery as well. Between that and the ongoing explosions and the flames leaping high into the air, the zombies were drawn like moths to a lantern.
“How far away is that?” asked Rochelle Lewis nervously. “That smoke looks pretty toxic.”
“About four miles,” Tom answered. “And, yeah, it’s nothing you want to be breathing.” He pointed to the smoke plume. “But the way the winds usually blow around here, it’ll go out over the lake. Might be pretty rough for anyone still alive in Miller, but I don’t think we’ll get hit with it.”
“Unless the wind changes direction,” Andy said.
Freddy Rodriguez spoke up. “You’re all being way too gloomy, folks. The way I see it, we got one hell of an opportunity here.” He pointed at the disaster in the distance. “That’s going to last for a while, isn’t it, Tom?”
“Oh, hell yes,” said the former refinery worker. “Without a functioning fire department, it could burn for days—not even counting for the fact that it’s almost sure to set other things on fire. Property values in Whiting are about to take a nose dive. Well, they would—if the zombies hadn’t already trashed them.”