by Ivan Turner
According to Naughton, who was openly dating Luco, she was making strides. There had been talk of an expert coming in from overseas, but very little had been said about this expert's qualifications. Naughton, who was usually up front with Heron, had told him outright that there was very little he could say about the expert. But he had nodded and winked, which meant very little to Anthony Heron.
It was just before 6:00 and the traffic was starting to thicken up around the city. Rush hour had been evolving for many years as work hours had changed and people had tried every which way they could to beat the traffic. There had been a time when Heron could never understand how people got into their cars and spend an hour and a half going sixteen miles to work. It seemed like the stuff of madness. And yet he had grown up and done it himself. The radio helped. Giving up on the fantasy of a better method and accepting it helped even more.
The office was almost empty at that time of the morning. It would be another two hours before the bulk of the staff started coming in to work. There were always people manning the phones and two squads available for immediate deployment. But they tried to give most of the staff daytime hours, rotating everyone in and out of night shifts. By keeping staff numbers low during the night hours, it gave everyone time with their families. Everyone except Anthony Heron.
His voice mail was choked with messages about zombie attacks, zombie experiments, zombie recipes, and zombies from outer space. It took him an hour to sift through all of them every day and he didn't even listen all the way through most of them. There was a written message from Jamie Mijaro, who was the investigating detective on the Culph murder case. Of course, he had reported the phone call with Culph and Mijaro would want to question him about it. In his email, there was a report from Gregory Smith. He and his team were investigating what had been termed Zombie Safe Houses, places where the zombie rights nuts were collecting and storing zombies so that they wouldn't be "slaughtered" by police or turned in for experimentation. The week before, they'd discovered such a collection at Angus Construction Yard, when Shawn Rudd had texted Heron during what appeared to be a zombie hunt. Shawn was missing now. Smith had posted officers to watch the yard in an effort to find out who was responsible for the collection. Nothing had come of it on that end, but he had arrested two people posting signs labeling the yard as a safe house.
Jeff and Belle Percy were the parents of Tiffany Percy. During the hunt at Angus, she had been bitten by a zombie and, of course, subsequently died as a result. Apparently unsatisfied with the efforts of the police department, Jeff and Belle had taken matters into their own hands. They had posted signs all over the yard, identifying it to the public. Though they claimed to be working on their own, similar signs had popped up in two other locations, one of which had been set afire. The result of that fire was that one firefighter had been killed and another had been critically injured. He was still in the hospital.
For a long while, Heron just sat at his desk and was lost in thought. It was rare that he had nothing to do, at least nothing that couldn't wait, and he basked in it. Sometime after 8:00, the light on his phone went on so he picked it up. The receptionist informed him that Officer Greg Smith was on the line for him so he instructed her to put him through.
"Good morning, Lieutenant."
"Morning, Smith. What's up?"
"Do you feel like coming out to Brooklyn?"
Heron sighed.
***
SMITH was feeling a bit anxious over having the lieutenant out to the Angus site. After their discovery of the location, Heron had put him in charge of what essentially amounted to a stakeout. He was given men to assign and ordered to wait and watch. But no one had come to the site to check on the zombies. In fact, until their arrest of the Jeff and Belle Percy, they hadn't even known the significance of the location. That was actually a primary goal of the job. Heron wanted to know how and why so many different zombies were in that one place. Well, they knew that now. The ZRA was collecting them into safe houses so they wouldn't be persecuted. Their web site actually used that word. Persecuted.
But now there was a new development. The zombie activity over the last few days, since they had caught the Percys hanging signs, had been steadily diminishing. The day before had marked two days since any of the officers on duty had reported a sighting on the grounds. Choosing to use his authority as commander of the mission, he ordered a squad inside. All of the zombies were gone. All but one, that is.
Heron arrived about an hour after their phone conversation. Traffic was a bear at that time of day. By the time he arrived, he was craving a cigarette badly. The cravings had been coming back since the end of the chemotherapy. He knew it was psychological but that didn't seem to help any. Two officers were standing by the squad van smoking and when he saw them it was all he could do not to pick out some minor detail and rail on them about it. Instead, he located Smith and tried to regulate his breathing.
Between Smith's anxiety and Heron's irritability, their conversation was volatile.
"What's brought me out to Brooklyn?" Heron asked sharply.
In a clipped tone, Smith filled him in on the details. He could see the lines around Heron's eyes and mouth tightening as he listened. He was not pleased and there were any number of reasons why. Dozens of zombies had been smuggled away right out from under the noses of Smith's men. Smith had ordered a raid without getting authorization. But Heron wasn't upset about any of those things. He was just wondering why he'd had to come all the way to Brooklyn to hear a report that could just as easily have been emailed to him. In fact, aside from that, he was pleased with Smith's initiative in ordering the raid. He was thinking that Smith would make a better second in command than Culph had. So good, in fact, that he could shoulder some of the burden.
"I wanted you to see this, Lieutenant, and tell me how to handle it," Smith was saying.
Nodding, Heron followed him into the yard. It looked a lot different in the daylight than it had at night. The piles of work material weren't nearly as foreboding as they had been. The dark buildings weren't so dark. He could see that all of the windows had been broken. Every last one of them. Smith had ordered that so that there would be as much sunlight as possible when his men went inside.
"There's a tunnel that leads from a subbasement to an unused sewage pipe. It leads to the river, but there's an accessway that opens out onto dry land. It's pretty obvious that they used that to get all of the zombies out. If they did it at night, it would have been easy to move them all without my men knowing."
Heron nodded, understanding.
"We've checked every building," Smith continued. "The ZRA people were pretty thorough. There's only one zombie left on the premises and we think she was, well, hiding."
Heron stopped short. "Did you say hiding?"
Smith turned to look at him, big saucer eyes and well defined cheekbones making an odd medley with his worried expression. "Yes, sir."
"What makes you think that?"
"You really need to see her to understand."
Heron gestured forward and Smith resumed walking. The two didn't speak after that. They went past the materials and into one of the buildings that was near where Heron had found Shawn's cell phone. He patted his pocket where he kept it. He'd bought a charger for it so the battery wouldn't die and he prayed every day that Shawn would return or he would call it or something would come through that would lead him to the boy's whereabouts. He had personally filed the missing persons report and paid for two thousand fliers to be made and distributed. But there were so many missing persons nowadays and it was a one in a million chance that Shawn would ever be found.
Inside the building was dusty but decently lit. There weren't any really tall buildings in the vicinity so the light hit pretty much the entire yard. Smith led Heron up four three of stairs to the top floor. There were two officers standing at the entranceway to the stairs and another with his weapon trained on a figure huddled on the floor. The figure was clearly a zombie and
clearly a woman. She had long auburn hair, still looking pretty much as it had in life. But her skin was that awful grayish color and you could see the blue veins pushing through. She wore a T-shirt with the peace sign on it and a pair of blue jeans. On the front of the T-shirt was a sticker, one of those introduction stickers that people wear at support groups or meet and greets. It was tough to see because of her position but Heron squatted and angled his head.
HELLO: MY NAME IS Linda - Please DON'T hurt me.
"Is this a joke?" Heron asked, turning his head toward Smith.
Smith just shook his head. "I don't guess she wrote it herself. Maybe one of the ZRA guys stuck it on her before they left."
"Then why leave her behind?" Heron asked, standing and backing away.
Smith shrugged. "That's why we think she was hiding. We found her crouched under there." He indicated an old wooden desk. It was easy to see underneath but there were some old drapes that were discarded into the corner. Smith informed Heron that the drapes had been awkwardly covering the desk. Linda had only come out from underneath when they'd pulled them aside.
"She gave us a hell of a scare," he said. "She even hissed at us. But that's it, lieutenant. She hasn't made a move since. Have you ever seen a zombie that just sits and cowers?"
Heron shook his head. She looked just like a frightened animal, except the eyes still lacked expression. She was a zombie all right but she was unlike any zombie Heron had encountered. He thought of Dr. Luco saying that there would be all sorts of unusual zombie anomalies popping up. And Heron, as the officer in charge of protecting the public from them, would have the opportunity to observe many of them firsthand.
"I just thought it was important," Smith said, suddenly doubting himself.
A zombie that screamed, a zombie that fired bullets at oncoming policemen, and now a zombie that was scared. It was getting time to look past the George Romero definition of zombies. Both the screamer and the shooter were long gone, dissected and analyzed in the laboratories beneath Arthur Conroy Memorial Hospital. But this one…
"Do we have someplace we can keep her?"
"You mean besides Arthur Conroy?"
Heron nodded. "I want to watch her myself."
"Can't you…" but Smith stopped himself. If Heron didn't want to entrust Linda into the care of Dr. Luco then there was a reason for it. "I'll set something up in the basement at headquarters."
"Good," Heron said. "Until then, just keep a guard on her here. Get guards who don't get easily spooked. I don't want her being accidentally shot."
"Will do, lieutenant."
"I'm glad you called me, Smith. Good job."
***
PUSH UPS was quiet. It was after the morning rush and most of the crowd had finished their workout and gone on to their jobs. Abby was left with a couple of people who worked odd schedules or didn't work at all. She didn't know them well, but recognized them as regulars. They weren't interested in having conversations, just listening to their music and running their treadmill or elliptical. That was all right with Abby. After the morning, she was all talked out. Being friendly with most of the clients was good for business but it made it difficult for her to get any work done.
Shortly after ten o'clock, the door opened and in walked Anthony Heron. She hadn't seen him in a few weeks and had figured that their friendship, borne of a mutual interest in zombies, had sort of fizzled as their lives went in other directions. After a few cases of the zombie infection had been linked to Push Ups, he'd asked her to be on the lookout for any trouble. Since Suzanna DeForest, there had been no others so she hadn't had a reason to call him. And clearly, he'd had no reason to call on her.
"I was in the neighborhood," he explained with a grin. "Sorry I haven't been in touch."
"That's all right. Everyone's busy."
The truth was that she was feeling somewhat guilty. The week before, she'd gotten involved in a movement to counter the Zombie Rights Association. It had all seemed harmless at the time but something had gone horribly wrong. Peter Ventura, a doctor who had been trapped in the Sisters of Mercy ER with her had recruited her to post signs on zombie safe houses. On the news the next morning, she saw that there had been a fire at the building where they'd put up the signs. Peter swore up and down that he was not responsible for the fire but that didn't mean the signs weren't. A firefighter had been killed. For two days she had cried and Martin, her husband, hadn't known why. She blamed it on hormones and trauma, both of which she had to spare.
"How are things here?" Heron asked.
Abby shrugged. "Normal, I suppose. Or whatever passes for normal these days. How's your job?"
He grinned. "It's killing me. It's bad enough fighting zombies but now we're pinched between the zombie rights nutjobs and a new group that's on the other end of the spectrum."
Abby tried to hide her startled look. "What group?"
He dismissed it. "Nevermind. I didn't come in to talk about zombies. I came in to see a normal face and have a normal conversation. Tell me about Martin and Sammy."
She wanted to press him, but she didn't know why. She knew exactly what he was talking about. By coming into the gym to talk to her he had unwittingly put her in a very awkward position. She respected Anthony Heron and the job he did. She knew that it was because of him that they had overridden the lockdown on the ER when she had been trapped. She knew that he fought hard every day to keep the city as safe as it could be. And yet she still went along with Peter, who said the police and the government were hastening the apocalypse by doing nothing. Heron had used the word pinched. It described exactly what she felt.
"Martin hates his job," she said. "But at least he has one. Sammy's fine. I think he feels the tension, but really doesn't understand what's going on." He was only two years old.
"I wish I could say the same," Heron said. "Mellie's seen and heard too much. Alicia tells me that she wakes up every night screaming that her daddy's been killed."
"But you don't go out on calls, do you?" Abby asked.
"Sometimes, but I don't really put myself in harm's way. Naughton would have my head."
She smiled. "You're that valuable?"
He smiled back. "They'd better give me a day off and soon. I'm starting to become a zombie myself."
They eased into a conversation after that. A few minutes went by with simple chit chat, enough to relax them both. Abby brightened as the door opened and in walked John Arrick. Heron turned to see him and knew they had met before but couldn't place the face. Arrick recognized the lieutenant immediately.
From Abby's perspective, Arrick looked terrible. He was, if anything, thinner. He certainly hadn’t been working out so he must not have been eating. His eyes were sunken and she could see dark circles underlining them. He had this perpetual expression of doom. For a moment, it appeared as if he was going to turn around and leave, but he thought better of it.
"How are you, John? What brings you in?"
He tried a small smile. "It's a testing day so I don't start for another hour and a half. Late proctoring, you know. I thought I might try getting back to my exercises."
"That's great," Abby said. "Oh, this is Lieutenant Anthony Heron. He's a friend of mine."
"We've met," Arrick said.