Harrison decided he’d listened to enough of our chatter and tried to sit up. This in itself was inadvertently pathetic; the sheet was tucked in tightly around him, and he kept lurching up against it, unable to break loose. I almost smiled. “Give me some advance notice next time, Doc, and I’ll short-sheet it.”
Doctor Samuels nodded, evidently finding the show fascinating. “Repetitive motions…he will probably continue to jerk against the sheet until he frees himself.”
Maybe Harrison just found us really, really irritating. If some mad scientist in a stained lab coat was observing me after I just woke up, I might try to bite his face off, too. What if the zombie apocalypse could be cured by a decent cup of coffee?
Tony unholstered his pistol, but didn’t take aim just yet. “So, Doc…this is what you do?”
“Yes.” The doctor sounded distracted, his gaze entirely focused on Harrison. “The nurses and medics can handle most of the cases here. That frees up the rest of us for research.”
He put a pretty good spin on it. In actuality, Elderwood Community College didn’t have any medical facilities beyond the one we presently occupied, so things like invasive surgeries and chemotherapy were out of the question. One of the doctors had miraculously removed an appendix shortly after we’d arrived in camp, but aside from that, we were largely limited to things we could physically treat without cutting someone open.
“Can’t wait to tell Dax about this,” Tony murmured.
I was pretty sure he didn’t mean that. Dax had toughened up considerably since we’d met weeks ago in my magazine’s office, but he probably wasn’t equipped to hear about reanimation and the creepy jerking motions that came with it.
Hell, I probably wasn’t equipped for it either, but all I’d felt for weeks was a sort of numbness. I could look a reanimating corpse and think that’s just awful, but the sheer horror didn’t touch me. Not entirely.
Maybe I was still in some sort of shock.
Harrison wrenched an arm free, jerking the sheet up with it. He lurched upright, his spine straightening out with a sickening crunch. A few seconds later, his head snapped around to stare at us, and his neck made a similar crunching noise.
I pulled out my pistol, thumbed off the safety, and pointed the thing at Harrison’s head. “Doc…”
“Reflexes kick on quite suddenly. No wonder Imelda got bitten.” Doctor Samuels hadn’t moved, which indicated nerves of steel or—more likely—some kind of paralyzing brain fart. “Back away slowly. Let’s see how long it takes him to reach us.”
My I’m in control façade started slipping. “Doc, this seems like a bad idea.”
“I second that notion,” Tony said.
Harrison twisted to the side and rolled right off the bed. He hit the floor with a dull thud, and Tony switched off his pistol’s safety. I beckoned to the doctor with my free hand. “Time to move. They bite ankles, you know.”
Harrison flopped around like a fish for a moment or two. It might have all been very amusing if he hadn’t abruptly placed his hands on the floor and pushed himself to his feet.
I figure this is why some people have trouble putting down the returning dead—at times they’re eerily human.
I kept the gun trained on him. “Doc…”
“Subject reaches attack position quickly. Seems to regain use of limbs very fast…maybe he’s remembering how to use them?” Doctor Samuels tilted his head, as though he hadn’t considered that thought before. “Seems uncertain as to which target to go after…”
“You do this all day?” Tony asked.
Harrison opened his mouth and emitted a low growl, then dragged his right foot forward. I broadened my stance; once they began the undead hokey-pokey, attack was only seconds away.
Doctor Samuels nodded glumly. “Pretty much. All right, Vibeke, you may dispatch him.”
BANG!
Harrison’s eyes crossed before he toppled over.
I kept the gun on him for a moment longer, just in case he decided to get back up. For the most part, all those awful zombie movies I hated so much were spot-on: you got them in the head, and they stayed down for the long haul. But everything else had gone wrong since this whole endtimes business began, so I figured it wouldn’t take long for the zombies to develop some sort of resistance to bullets, or learn how to fly, or something similarly inconvenient.
I re-holstered my pistol. If I could avoid puking on the dude, I’d consider it a job well done.
The doctor picked up his clipboard and jotted down several sentences, his frown growing more by the moment. “I was afraid of this.”
“Afraid people still got up?” Tony asked. He nodded at me and said, “Good shot.”
“Thanks.”
Doctor Samuels shook his head. “No. We had our hunches, but…well, I suppose I’ll have to tell Hammond.”
“Tell him what?” I asked. This whole operation was starting to reek of bad news.
Doctor Samuels picked up his largely untouched dinner tray. Damn, the man had planned on eating during a reanimation? That sort of thing would put me right off my canned corn. “Harrison was a diabetic,” he said. “We ran out of insulin a few weeks ago, when command stopped sending the medical supplies. We tried to control it with diet, but he slipped into a coma a few days ago, and expired…oh, yesterday morning.”
Hmm. That didn’t jive with the usual story we received, like Harrison being bitten by a ravenous fiend from the tenth layer of hell, or Harrison trying to resuscitate his dead girlfriend, who had promptly displayed her gratitude by biting his lips off.
“He wasn’t bitten,” the doctor said, just in case Tony and I were too thick to process his meaning. “We checked him thoroughly. Not a mark on him.”
“Maybe he was bitten before and it just healed up?” I asked.
“He was one of the first residents of Elderwood Refugee Camp. Most of the long-term refugees came here before the outbreak reached us—it took time to migrate down from the impact sites, or so we thought. But some of us had been wondering about its rapid spread, especially considering how slow most of the revenants are…”
Tony finally re-holstered his gun. “Something about the undead makes people do real stupid things. That’s what you should look into.”
“We knew the dead were getting up without a transmitting bite, but only in the areas nearest the impact sites. Harrison was never near any…and that puts a bit of a twist on our diagnosis,” the doctor went on, as if Tony hadn’t said a word. “It’s in the air. It seems those who are further away take longer to wake up, after they die, but they do indeed wake up. Probably with disastrous results for those who think only a bite transmits the cooties.”
That was probably everyone. “This doesn’t sound good, Doc,” I said.
“It’s not meant to.” He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the ceiling, and the leaden skies a few feet above it. “We were operating on the belief that those who survived outside a five-mile radius were free of the pathogen, provided they were not bitten. And once we figured out how to treat the bites, well, all the better. But communiqués from other camps, when we still received them, suggested some disturbing findings. I suspect whatever the meteors brought with them has lingered, and Lord knows we’ve all inhaled it.”
Doctors have an irritating habit of cloaking their actual diagnosis in a lot of confusing jargon. “You’re saying we’re all infected?”
“I’m saying we probably all have the pathogen. Maybe the immune system keeps it at bay until death or severe illness. There’s too much we still don’t know, and won’t be able to figure out until we have access to better labs. But yes, I think it’s transmitted by air. The bites likely exacerbate the situation, or host a more virulent form of the virus…” He favored us with one of the most depressed smiles I’d ever seen. “I hate it when things don’t play out like they do in the movies.”
Tony sighed. “Well, shit.”
“My sentiments exactly,” the doctor said, heading for t
he doorway. “Please, do not talk about this to anyone. Even the general; he needs to decide the next move. Either way, we’re going to have to drastically change the way we handle the bodies. That burial pit…”
“Burial pit?” I asked. That sounded all kinds of ominous.
“The military has been…well, we needed a place to put bodies. Those who had died of natural causes, you see. We couldn’t keep them here, not with the threat of cholera. There’s a pit about twelve miles east that used to be a pond before the drought…”
I refrained from burying my face in my hands. “I’m guessing we should rename it the reanimation pit?”
Tony rolled his eyes. “Rock Weekly had you writing headlines, didn’t they? Well, I called it. Evil stardust will do us in.”
Doctor Samuels paused at the door. “Evil stardust?”
“Tony thinks evil stardust is the root of all our problems,” I said.
The doctor nodded thoughtfully. “That sounds about right.”
Ugh. If I’d thought Tony was a pain in the ass before, he’d be downright unbearable now.
Doctor Samuels left us alone with twice-dead Harrison. I briefly wondered if I was supposed to move him, or if we could safely leave him here for some peon to manage. “Well, this blows.”
The biker on the other side of the room moaned softly, and I whirled around, yanking my pistol out. Tony had to physically shove my hand down. “Easy, Annie Oakley. He’s just waking up.”
The patient opened his eyes and focused blearily on me, then dragged his hand across his face. “What the hell happened?”
“You’re in our medical facility,” I said. “I’m Vibeke. I stitched you up.”
“Stitched me up?” He still couldn’t really move, but his gaze darted around in alarm. “What happened to me? And why does my ass hurt?”
Oh, this was about to get awkward.
TWO
“Good morning, Midlands Cluster,” Gloria Fey murmured through my headphones two days later. “Sorry for the long silence, but we ran into some unpleasant sorts while looking for fuel. Looks like our local brigands have increased their territory…”
She might as well have renamed her program Bad News with Gloria Fey. No one knew how she continually pushed through her transmissions; with all the crap in the air, even the military installations had trouble hearing each other.
But Gloria Fey, former entertainment reporter for the nightly news, had somehow gotten her hands on some high-end transmitting equipment, and seemingly overnight had transformed herself into the go-to girl for all of our daily post-apocalyptic goodness. Twice a day, every day, she told everyone with a working radio how bad things were, where to go for help, and other interesting (and often classified) findings compiled by her scouts.
She did not, however, talk about people outside the blast radius reanimating. Apparently that was still a well-kept secret.
General Hammond ground his teeth every time someone mentioned her, but he seemed to put up with her existence. What else could he do? She was as much a link to better times as she was a harbinger of what might be a very dark future. And besides, she had a lot of intel on where the local troublemakers were hanging out, which made life easier for our scavenging groups.
Listening to Gloria had become a sort of morning ritual for me in the days and weeks after we arrived in Elderwood, and she filled me in on all the bad news in the world as I shimmied into my jeans, two layers of socks, and boots. “Those crazy brigands,” I muttered, looking around for my tank top and thermal shirt.
My tentmate, a former teacher named Augusta, grumbled and rolled away from me, pulling the blankets up over her head. I would have apologized, but we went through this every morning.
Augusta and I got along pretty well. During our rare downtime, she taught me random self-defense moves and I tried to teach her how to shoot straight, but we usually worked opposite shifts. On a daily basis, I got up early and dressed quietly, but all efforts at being polite went out the window when Tony showed up to walk me to work.
She hadn’t tried to strangle me yet. I figured it was only a matter of time.
Gloria began rattling off the last known positions of local brigands. She’d been talking about them since I’d gotten to Elderwood, and it had taken me a few days to figure out she was using the new PC term for roving biker gangs, which had become all the rage since the apocalypse hit. Gloria droned on while I rummaged around for my shirt under the bed. Where did I drop that thing?
“I’m heading out,” Tony announced, barging into my tent.
I screeched and snatched up a blanket, covering myself as much as I could manage.
Augusta sat up with a gasp, fumbling around for the bat she kept near her cot. “What? What is it?”
“It’s just Tony.” I scowled at him over the blanket and yanked my headphones down around my neck. “What do you want?”
“Hastings stopped reporting. I’m going to see if they’re still around.” His gaze dropped to the blanket, and that old sardonic smirk found its way to his face. “Aren’t we past this?”
“In what universe are we past this?” Yeah, the dead walked and Facebook was a distant memory, but that didn’t mean Tony was getting a free show.
What did he say about Hastings? I stood up a little straighter. As far as I knew, Hastings was the only city that still talked to us. “Hastings stopped reporting?”
Augusta must have realized that sleeping in wasn’t on the agenda. She sat up with a groan, pushed her dreadlocks back from her face, and reached over to turn up our oil lamp. “Vibeke, tell your boyfriend to stop showing up before we’re dressed.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.” I’d at least managed to put on my bra before he came bursting inside, and I spotted my tank top stuffed halfway under my pillow. “Tony, can you turn your back or something so I can—”
“Goddammit, McKnight, what about covert ops don’t you understand?” General Isaac Hammond—who I felt could’ve been Denzel Washington’s stunt double in another life—strode into the tent like he owned the place, realized I was still partially undressed, and had the good grace to look abashed. “Oh, hell. I apologize, ladies.”
“To answer your question, Tony only has a passing familiarity with the word covert,” I said, scowling at my one-time coworker. “Subtlety isn’t his thing.”
The general turned his own scowl on Tony, who seemed thoroughly unrepentant. “Covert means quiet. It means you don’t go blabbing about your mission to everyone in sight.”
“I’m not telling everyone in sight. I’m telling my lady-friend. She’ll miss me if I’m gone. Right?”
I stared at him. “Can I put my shirt on now?”
The tent flap moved again, and Dax poked his head inside. “So were they naked?” he asked, looking about as wicked as he could manage—which, with his big blue eyes and mop of blond hair, wasn’t really wicked at all. Mischievous, maybe, but not wicked.
Boys will be boys, even after the world ends. I would have thrown something at him if it hadn’t required dropping the blanket. “Will you all fucking leave if I have a wardrobe malfunction?” I demanded.
I realized the general was still standing there and felt my cheeks get red. “Sorry, General.”
General Hammond just buried his face in his hands.
I know how you feel, General, I thought. I had to freaking live with them in Astra.
In my previous life, I’d been an associate editor and roving reporter for Rock Weekly, a struggling magazine that had not quite managed to make the transition to the Internet. I’d been interviewing Dax’s band, the Blood Nuts, after a late show when the meteors fell and turned downtown Astra into an inferno. We’d found Tony, an editor at the gun magazine upstairs, the next day, and holed up there while the world fell apart around us.
Tony had guns—antique guns, but hell, they worked—so we all stuck together. I was still impressed we’d managed to survive each other, much less the endtimes.
Augusta sighed a
nd pulled the covers back over her head. “I really hate your friends, Vibeke.”
“They’re not my friends, they’re my freaky traveling companions. Did you bring the dog, too?” Dax had formally taken over the role of caring for Evie, since he rarely had to leave camp for anything. He took her with him when he made his rounds, and she was a hit with just about everyone.
I always wondered about Evie, though. Tony and I had stumbled across the small golden retriever in a parking lot while encountering our first undead, and she followed us back to the magazine offices. Where had she come from? What happened to her original owners? Was her cheerful nature just the way goldens were, or did her walnut-sized brain mean she didn’t feel pain the way humans did?
“Nah, I left her with the guard. I know Gussie’s allergic.” Dax smiled at the lump that represented my roommate. I figured Dax was a few years younger than Tony and myself; he hadn’t lost his youthful good nature yet.
It got obnoxious after a while.
“Aw, shucks, Dax, you’re all right. The rest of you can go to hell.” Augusta peeked out from under the covers. “Uh, not you, General. You’re all right, too.”
“I’m relieved,” he said dryly, returning his attention to Tony. “Is there anyone else you’d like to inform? The cooks, maybe, or the camp children? How about you set off a panic while you’re at it?”
Everyone seemed to have forgotten that I was standing there in only a bra and my jeans, so I decided to try forgetting about it, too. “What’s going on in Hastings?”
General Hammond sighed, then reached up to adjust his cap. I’m pretty sure explaining a covert operation to a medic, a guard, and a processor hadn’t ranked high on his to-do list for the morning. “The last report we had out of Hastings was that Los Angeles went completely dark. No response to hails.”
Dax forgot about being polite and came right into the tent. “What did you say about Los Angeles?”
Death and Biker Gangs Page 2