by John Ringo
They set out down the crest for the Foresight Genetics compound. Nora kept a dozen paces behind Lou’s comforting yellow bulk, her shotgun cocked and leveled, scanning the woods as they went. With the coming of dusk, the zombies were moving around again, looking for food. Every so often they found a few unlucky people who thought by holding out in the hills above Nashville that they’d be safe. Most of the time, the zombies caught deer and rabbits. She’d seen the corpses of the ones that had taken on raccoons or coyotes. The claw marks and bites were deeper than anything that a human being could inflict on one another. Nora hated to think it served them right, but it did. Her Choctaw grandmother had told her that harboring feelings of revenge did more harm to her spirit than to her enemies, but Nora refused to let go. Not until that zombie was dead.
The arrival that morning of the government helicopter to pick up the weekly load of vaccine had brought the alphas out of hiding. A whole group of zombies had tried to batter their way in through the compound gate, using rocks and sticks as bludgeons. The electric fence took care of a couple of them. The volunteers and Homeland Security people shot as many of the rest as they could and drove off the remainder. Management sent teams out to clean up survivors. When the cameras had picked up this man, with his red hair, Nora insisted that he would be their quarry.
Rustling in the bushes put her on higher alert. She and Lou had been vaccinated, once, but the immunologist on staff reminded them that they still needed another shot in a couple of days. Nora dreaded the effects of a bite, but she was determined to take down that red-headed zombie.
* * *
If it hadn’t been for footage on their security system that Sid had insisted on installing in their house up in the hills, she would never have known what had happened to him and their son. Nora still cursed the day that she had had to stay overnight to monitor an experiment. It was common practice for any of the scientists, but her timing had been fateful. When she had called down to see how things were going, a neighbor had answered the phone, weeping. Nora had downloaded the contents of the security cameras off the web, before they went down for good. The zombie that had attacked Sid and Charlie on their own doorstep had been their longtime mailman. The bastard had even grinned up at the camera as if he knew she would see it.
The news reports were way behind the pace of the zombie epidemic. It had spread so fast that whole communities were wiped out in a matter of weeks. The police, what was left of them, advised her to stay where she was.
Foresight Genetics had always been a leader in research. They had several facilities in Tennessee, mostly centered in Nashville, but that had become a no-go area fairly early on. To her horror, Nora had watched an otherwise dignified corporate executive and scientist strip out of her clothes and go crazy while on an internet conference call.
Luckily, Nora’s facility had been situated on the edge of the city, not in the center of town, where everyone at the Grand Old Opry or any of the tourist sites became infected or died in a matter of days. The management of Foresight Genetics lived up to their name and moved their electron microscopes and centrifuges, along with the scientists and technicians to run them, and anyone else who had remained uninfected, out of the city, up to a small factory on the ridge northwest of Nashville that was powered by a dynamo in the river below. When the grid went down, they could still keep running. Foresight was one of the facilities tapped by the government from the Hole to stop every other project and work on a cure. Along with her fellow technicians, Nora had junked all her precious experiments and started to work on isolating and eradicating the bloodborne pathogen.
Lou had a similar horror story to tell. His wife and kids were returning from visiting her parents Denver on a Greyhound bus. They came back infected. Lou had been lucky to escape a few days later with his life when all of them turned at once. He had set up a cot behind his desk in Receiving and refused to talk with anyone for days.
As a result, all of them had cringed when they got on the heavily guarded bus to take them up to the new facility, cleaned out and secured by grim-faced soldiers who wouldn’t talk about their experiences, either. They collected as many family members and stragglers as they could who showed no signs of bites or symptoms. Only a couple disappeared in the first few days. No one talked about what had happened to them. Denesa Campbell, head of Human Services, took over organizing child care and housing. People who had lost loved ones paired off or created ad hoc family groups. Someone brought in a few chickens, five cats, nine dogs and a goat.
* * *
Using human spinal tissue for the vaccine weighed heavily on everyone’s conscience. The management did their best to deal with the ethics, offering counseling and advice to the researchers and other staff. In the end, they established a parallel research track. Half the facility would keep on with vaccine manufacture, but Foresight would begin working to develop a treatments to give humans immunity against the microorganism that didn’t require anyone to die for their manufacture. In the meantime, the zombies, unaware anyone cared that they used to be human, kept on hammering at the perimeter, trying to get at Foresight’s employees to turn them or eat them.
Nora had been squeamish at first about the formula for the vaccine, but came to terms with it in short order. She thought it was hypocritical of the others to wail on and on about the source of tissue, when each of them going through high school and college biology, not to mention previous research programs, had sacrificed dozens, if not hundreds, of rats, guinea pigs, hamsters, even chimpanzees, in the name of science. This wasn’t just science; it was survival. On a personal and spiritual level, she had been horrified beyond belief to have to kill people. An eye for an eye was a bad idea and bad practice. Wiping out a predator was not. When management had asked for volunteers to help defend the compound and bring in more “samples,” Nora sucked it up and stepped forward. She had brought down her first buck at eleven. Mild-tempered Lou, from the middle of Indianapolis, turned out to have hunted rabbits with his granddaddy from the time he had been a tot. He couldn’t kill the person who had caused his family’s deaths, but he had volunteered to help wipe out the zombies around the compound.
They’d eyed each other askance when management teamed them up, the skinny little half-Choctaw woman and the big African-American man, but they turned out to be a good team. Her small, lithe figure allowed her to slip in between trees and rocks to take tricky shots. Lou never ran out of energy, and he was strong enough to haul a body on his shoulder for miles. They never talked about their mutual losses. It was just too painful. At least, they could do something to avenge them.
* * *
When they were a couple hundred yards out, they were in range for the radios to work. Nora clicked on her walkie-talkie and spoke against the hiss.
“Nora and Lou with a delivery.”
“Gotcha.”
The National Guardswoman on duty at the gate saw them coming and put out the call to the others. As soon as they got inside, two technicians with a gurney were waiting to take their kill. Gratefully, Lou and Nora stripped off their plastic suits and tossed them into the incinerator pit on top of a pile of yellow already there. That part of the lot was fenced off to keep the facility’s flock of chickens from falling in or getting contaminated. Eggs and the occasional stewing hen were important sources of healthy protein for the inhabitants.
“Everyone else come back already?” Nora asked Brenda Hatton, one of her fellow lab rats, as they followed the wheeled table into the main building.
“Most of ’em are still out,” the heavy-set young woman said. “Courtland Jones got bit. He’s in isolation.”
“How bad?”
“Dunno,” Brenda said, her hazel eyes welling with tears. “He’s only had the same one inoculation that the rest of us have. I hope he makes it.” Nora squeezed the young woman’s shoulder with sympathy. Brenda nodded. Everyone knew the risks.
She tossed her short blond braids in the direction of the side door. “There’s some c
hicken stew in the cafeteria, and fresh sweet tea. Y’all can go get some, but management wants to see you right after.”
Nora exchanged a glance with Lou. “Anything wrong?”
“Not wrong,” Brenda said. She grinned, an expression few of them saw those days. “Maybe right. Lincoln’s got a breakthrough, he thinks. Go on and eat. Management will bring you up to speed soon’s you finish.”
“Hey, come and sit down!” Management, in the person of Lincoln Fairbrun, had held the whole group together for the last months. He was a tall man, with weather-beaten, creased red skin, a high forehead and a little fringe of brown hair mixed with gray on top. For the first time, Nora saw how the strain all of them had been carrying was telling on their boss. His little sleeping room, the only real office he had any more, smelled of stale tobacco. It was a polite fiction that nobody smoked any more. Cigarettes from abandoned houses were almost as prized as untainted food. He played with a burned-out, crushed stub at the melamine table. A raft of folded metal chairs leaned against the wall. Only three were unfolded, including the one he sat in. He wasn’t expecting anybody else.
“What’s up, sir?” Lou asked, holding one of the chairs for Nora, then sliding into the last.
Management’s gray eyes, swallowed up in nests of wrinkles, held a light. “Paul and Sarah are pretty sure they’ve got a working bacteriophage. It’s one that normally goes after blood parasites. They’ve adapted some that seem to attack the microorganism. They’re working to develop enough for ongoing therapy. If this works out, it can reverse the zombie plague.”
Nora felt hope rising in her soul. “That’s great news, sir! Do you need us to help them?”
Management waved his hand. “Not much you can do. I’ve got volunteers already to staff every shift and watch its development. If this was happier times, we’d be waiting to get approval from the FDA for animal testing. But it isn’t.”
“No, sir,” Nora said. She narrowed her eyes at Fairbrun. “What do you need from us?”
Management sighed. “These are desperate times, Nora. We’ve got a couple of hunters who have been bit, and we’ll try the therapy on them. We need subjects for testing. Live subjects.”
“Bullshit, man,” Lou said, his eyes burning with fury. “You want us to bring zombies into the only place maybe in the state where there aren’t any?”
Fairbrun threw up his hands. “We have to be able to observe them, Lou. If we treat and release, we can’t track their progress. They could get eaten by other zombies. They could go into spontaneous remission that has nothing to do with the treatment. We need to know.”
“These people are murderers,” Nora said. “You know—” She stopped talking as tears filled her eyes and throat. Fairbrun reached over and took her hand.
“I know what I’m asking. We might be able to save a lot more people, reverse this plague. Six of the others have agreed to try and bring back live, er, specimens. You’re the best team we’ve got out there. Will you help?”
Nora turned to look into Lou’s eyes. He was torn. So was she. But to be able to go home, or to what was left of home, was something she ached for. She nodded. Her heart was full of anger and resentment, but it was a way forward.
“Good. Julian is leading the pack. Get some sleep. We’ll start out at dawn, when the alphas are still out.”
* * *
“Did you sleep?” she asked Lou the next morning, as they gathered in the predawn chill. The eight hunters and volunteers from among the non-employees stood in the front lot near the gate, along with the six hunting hounds who had been among the dogs brought in. At least the dogs looked eager.
The big man’s face looked slack with exhaustion. “No, but does it matter?”
“I guess not,” Nora said. Julian Ferrar, a stocky man with silvering hair and tawny skin who ran the electron microscopy lab, handed out ammunition and stun guns.
“Shoot to kill only if you’re threatened,” he said. “We need survivors. Try not to get bit, okay? You’re at your most vulnerable as the pathogen load dips in your bloodstream. Tomorrow everyone lines up for their second dose of vaccine. I don’t want anyone to have to get stuck in isolation next to the specimens.”
Specimens. No one was going to call them what they were: captive zombies to be used as laboratory experiments.
“How many of ’em do you want?” asked Patricia Strauss, belting her hazmat suit tight. The slim woman had been head receptionist and administrative assistant to Management, but she was a good shot.
“No more than twenty. No fewer than twelve. Truss ’em. We’ll haul them back in the bus into Shipping. Daniel’s got cages set up that ought to hold them. We ride the Jeeps.”
“Can we shoot to wound?” Ricky Pirelli asked. He was a big man whose beard was usually confined in a hairnet. Like Nora, he worked as a senior lab technician.
Julian glanced around at his hunting party, and nodded sharply. “Let’s go.”
The situation called for the use of the company vehicles, and as much of the precious supply of diesel as it took. Nora and Lou boarded a jeep with Julian and Pat and two of the dogs. A big brown Basset hound flopped itself across her lap and demanded petting.
They drove down the ridge road as the sky started to turn deep blue. A waning moon was in the western sky over the treetops. The sky smelled fresh, with no bitter, sharp scent of decaying flesh or urine from the zombies.
All that changed as they descended into the river valley. The zombies needed water, a lot of it, and they made more mess than a million pigeons. Broken branches, scattered rocks and other debris blocked the main road into Nashville. Abandoned cars showed how effective the obstruction had been at trapping victims for the alphas to carry off. Nora and the others rarely came down this way. They would be too badly outnumbered. She shook with nerves.
“Now, remember, we don’t have to get them all today,” Julian cautioned them as they drove. “Get in, get out alive.”
“Got it,” Nora and Lou chorused.
“Here we go.”
He had a boombox strapped to the front of the Jeep. As they hurtled down the hill, twangy country music rang out, echoing from point to point in the valley. Even as little as six months ago, the sound would have been swallowed up by the noise of traffic and a million other sounds of modern life. That day, that and the engine roars broke upon the ear like the last trump.
And it brought out the zombies, just as Management had said it would. Before they drove two miles, a group of filthy naked people broke out of the undergrowth and pelted after them. The second Jeep screeched around in a bootlegger’s turn and drove straight for the trio. Mike and his squad leaped out, yelling. The betas fled back into the trees, but four continued to run for the uninfected humans, seeing a potential meal. Julian brought his car around, too, seeking to herd the alphas toward the approaching bus. He slowed down enough for Pat, Nora and Lou to leap out.
Alphas might not be strictly human any more, but they weren’t stupid. They saw that they were outnumbered. The smallest, a woman with a slack belly and pendulous breasts, one badly bitten and infected, tried to make a break for it. Pat went after her, brandishing the stun gun. The woman dodged away from her, hissing like a cat. She had only the stubs of teeth in her mouth, but she carried a bent kitchen knife. She feinted with the knife. Pat triggered the stun gun, sending a crackling blue tongue out like a whip. The woman shrieked as the electricity hit her blade, making it jump out of her hand. She leaped for Pat, jagged nails out. Pat dodged her until the stunner regenerated enough for a second charge. Another blast of lightning, and the woman dropped on the road. Troy Stokes and Brenda piled out of the bus and went to collect her, careful to bind up her hands with wire ties before she came to.
The three men, crusted with feces and scabs, looked like they had once been in good enough shape to be athletes or soldiers. Nora thought the latter was more likely, since they worked together like a pack of wolves. Once they figured out the humans weren’t trying to kill the
m outright, they feinted here and there at the circle of hunters, looking for a way out. Mike had a stun gun in his left hand and a Luger in his right. He sent a tongue of lightning lashing out toward the biggest of the males. The stream missed, but it blinded all of the humans long enough for the zombies to rush at Julian, who was at their three o’clock. They brought him down on the pavement, tearing at his suit. Lou, Nora and the others rushed to try and drag them off.
The zombies might be naked, but they still had fingernails and teeth. The male sitting on Julian’s chest gnawed at the neck of the hazmat suit and clawed at the yellow plastic, shrieking with hunger. Lou raised the butt of his rifle and brought it down on the creature’s head. The zombie slid sideways at the last minute, so Lou’s blow hit him in the shoulder. It lashed out at him. The big man jumped backward. The second zombie leaped off Julian and grabbed Lou around the legs. Lou fell sideways. His rifle hit the ground with a clatter, but he never let go of it. He and the zombie struggled for control of the weapon. The dogs circled, snarling. The Basset hound closed its teeth on the zombie’s arm and shook it. The zombie wailed. It bit at Lou’s face, arms, chin, anything within reach. Nora moved around, looking for an opening to strike the man in the head. When he came up with a mouthful of yellow plastic, Nora swung the butt of her gun right in his face. Crunch! The zombie dropped backward, its eyes wide open, blood streaming out of its nose and mouth.
“I killed him!” Nora cried, disappointed in herself.
“Good for you,” Lou grunted, pushing the body off. He stood up. “Thanks, little sister.”
“Wily goddamn bastards!” Mike said. He rushed in and tased the third infected male. It quivered and fell over. Ricky kicked the body aside and heaved at the first zombie under its arms.
The male twisted in his hands like an eel, kicked him in the belly, and ran for the pine trees. Ricky looked at his empty hands in surprise. Nora, feeling that she had let the team down, dashed after the fleeing zombie. Lou and Pat pelted after her.