by Jack Wallen
“Shit.” The boy whispered.
“What do you see?”
The young soldier was mesmerized as he stared out into the hold. When his superior clocked him in the helmet and repeated the question, he finally remembered the mission.
“It’s full of ‘em. The humans are all dead.”
“Lock and load baby!” The commander whooped and smacked the large red panic button that raised the drop ship’s cargo door. The moaners were busy cleaning up after the brain matter buffet and didn’t realize they were being canned and carried off.
The closing of the cargo door came to a loud, metallic end and the drop ship lifted off. The zombie pilot pointed the ship back towards the Zero Day Collective. They would return, unload their cargo, load up a fresh buffet, and head out to lather, rinse, and repeat.
Chapter 19
November 23, 2016 9:25 PM
Seattle, Washington
I never thought I’d be so happy to see a city skyline. When the Space Needle came into view, I nearly cried. I had to be honest with myself; I wasn’t quite sure if we’d make it alive, or with our sanity intact. But here we were – complete. Jacob was cooing in the back seat, Echo and Gabe were gabbing about some odd pop culture meme, and I was desperately watching street signs.
“Echo, I need your help. We have to find Fourth Avenue and Yessler Way.”
Echo and Gabe went silent as Echo focused her attention out the passenger-side window. I needed to call Jamal and let him know we had arrived, but I was too unfamiliar with the city to make the call.
“Over there! Fourth Avenue! Right turn.” Echo squealed.
I turned the wheel to make the turn and slammed my foot down hard on the gas. The car took the turn with a squeal just as Echo screamed.
“Look out!”
The city street was filled with the walking dead. Moaners, screamers, and a few evolutionary left turns no one would have predicted. The burning of rubber filled the air as the car came to a jerking halt. The undead flash mob turned to the car in a synchronized, dance-like movement. As soon as I slammed the car in reverse and punched the gas, the screamers among the crowd took off after us. The sound was a chorus of demons and devils amplified and filtered through Purgatory’s own recording studio.
“Bethany! Get us out of here!”
“I’m trying Echo! Be my eyes for me. No, the other way!”
Echo had turned to watch out the rear window. I needed her to follow the trajectory and movement of the screamers giving chase. One wrong move on my part and we were nothing more than canned snack food.
“Shit! Bethany, one of them is about to… ”
Echo didn’t have to finish the sentence. The sound of the zombie’s feet slamming down on the roof of the Audi was punctuation enough. I punched the gas again, jerked the wheel, put the car in neutral, tapped the brakes, and let the car start spinning. As soon as the front end was at ninety degrees I put the car in third and waited for the completion of the one-eighty. Once the geometry lesson was complete, I slammed the gas and the car took off.
The slamming of fist to roof informed me the zombie stunt man was holding fast. Dents began forming in the ceiling of the cockpit.
“Fuck!”
“Bethany, can he break through that?”
I really didn’t want to answer Gabe’s question. Screamers had proved that nothing could keep them from reaching fresh brains. And given the fact that Jacob was within this moving metal box, there was extra incentive.
Before my brain could rationalize a plan, Echo made a quick demand.
“Stop the car!”
“What? Why?”
“Just trust me, Bethany. Stop the car.”
There wasn’t time to argue. Rock ‘em, sock ‘em zombie was about to break through the roof of the car and we were about to become the main course for one pissed off undead son of a bitch. As my foot graced the rubber of the break, Echo grabbed the pike from my bag, opened the door, and leaped out. She landed on her feet with the grace of a panther and immediately leaped onto a dumpster. I couldn’t believe my eyes. All of a sudden the girl was some sort of kick ass super hero without the costume. She had the pike extended and was spinning it around as if she had been possessed by the spirit of Thor himself.
The monster roared and leaped down from the car. It spread it’s arms and flexed muscles I never knew the human body contained. The screamer’s neck was Batman’s cowl, without the S & M rubber look.
I couldn’t let Echo try to take on this thing alone, superhero action figure or not. My hand shot out for my bag and returned with my gun. Using a gun in this situation would not end well; but I couldn’t let that fucking monster crack open Echo’s skull.
Not on my watch.
“Stay in the car Gabe. Let nothing touch Jacob.”
As soon as my feet hit cement, my arms shot up to take aim. There was no shot to have. The beast was in mid-air, leaping toward Echo. She whirled the pike around just in time for the business end to meet the eyeball of the beast as it landed on the dumpster.
The screamer went silent. Echo kicked up hard and the zombie slid off the pike and came to a hard crash landing on the ground below. One tiny, volcanic splash of brown zombie oil from the eye socket was all the confirmation I needed the thing was dead undead.
How in the hell?
I couldn’t even finish the question before the sound of pissed off screamers (as if there were any other kind) let us know the gang was on its way.
“Get back in the car!” Echo called out as she jumped from the dumpster and landed beside the Audi.
I managed to convince my brain to remind my feet how to run and made it safely into the driver’s seat. The Audio took off with a screech to shame the screaming army just yards away. The turbo kicked in and the car sped off toward Yessler Way.
“How did you…” I started.
“You don’t survive on the streets for long without picking up some skills. I did a lot of training with these dudes that called themselves the Homeless Street Ninjas. I know, it sounds crazy; but they were legit. It was a thing. Without their help I would have been raped, beaten, and who knows what else.”
I couldn’t believe it. I had a fucking street hero with me and had been doing all the fighting alone.
“Why didn’t you bother to let me in on this? I could have used the help.”
“You asked me to protect Jacob. I did. This time, I had to protect you. I’m sorry. Why don’t we argue about this once we’ve found your friend?”
It’s hard when your logic is bested by a teen. I felt like handing in my Mensa membership.
“There’s Yessler!” Gabe shouted from the back seat.
My little tiff with Echo almost caused me to miss the turn. Thankfully, the all-wheel drive turned on a dime. All we had to do now was find Fourth Avenue and we were as home free as one could enjoy at the moment.
As I drove slowly down Yessler, my guilt grabbed my gut and yanked it downward. Sometimes I wanted to punch my conscience in the face. Other times, I was glad I owned up to my humanity.
“Echo… I’m sorry for busting your chops. I get it. We all have secret lives, pasts we’d either like to forget about or already have. But our situation kinda warrants the revealing of truths that could help forward our cause. So, in the spirit of survival, if you have a super power, share it.”
We all laughed. It was the only honest reaction that could follow such a demand. The laughter reignited our purpose and our hope. Sure this nightmare sucked the barrel full of monkeys out of the party, but hope still existed. It had to; else there was no reason to continue on.
“Shit!” Gabe exclaimed.
I slammed the brakes down hard.
“I can’t believe it.” Echo chimed in.
“We made it.”
I couldn’t help but laugh out loud again. The world was bedlam, rubble strewn about the land, but we made it across country to help rebuild it all; one piece, one moment, at a time.
I slipped
my phone out of my pocket and dialed Jamal’s number. As soon as he answered, I had but one simple thing to say.
“We’re here.”
Of course Jamal knew we were here. He’d be tracking us the whole time. How could he not? It was just a matter of pushing a tiny tracking app onto my phone. I knew he’d do it. Did I complain? Not once. Knowing the second best hacker in the world had the back of the best hacker on the planet was fine in my book.
A heavy door swung open. Two enormous men in Kevlar hustled out and stood on either side of the entry. The guards held serious firepower in their hands and had Hell Fire grenades strapped to their bandoleers. Someone certainly knew what they were doing.
“B-Zip! Fuck! Hot as evah!” Jamal’s voice carried out the door, preceding his lithe body by just a fraction of a second.
When his long arms appeared from the darkness, they were spread in a gesture of embrace… which we did. Our arms wrapped around one another, his nearly squeezing the breath from my lungs.
“Jesus, it’s good to see you Bethany.”
“I never thought I’d see this day Jamal.”
It had to be clear to everyone around us, there was a history. It was undeniable; the length and strength of the hug, the deep inhalation of breath, the relaxation of every muscle while at the same time an inexplicable tension rose from our cores… it all spoke of ‘story yet to be revealed’.
“Let’s get you and your friends inside.”
Jamal pulled away and turned toward the door. He gestured for me to head in first. I denied his request and insisted Echo and Gabe lead the way. As Echo passed, she handed Jacob’s bassinet over to me.
“Holy shit. Is this him? Is this the one?”
Jamal stared, wide-eyed, down at the still sleeping Jacob.
“Don’t go all Matrix on me Jamal. He’s not Neo and this is not the Nebuchadnezzar.” I smiled at Jamal and gave his shoulder a nudge.
“But you still make one hell of a Trinity. I’ll never get the vision of you in that body suit out of my mind.”
I winked at Jamal and entered the building. A few short seconds later, the heavy steel door slammed shut behind us. With the sunlight barred from entry, the darkness was almost overwhelming. Within a few seconds, my eyes adjusted and the environment was nothing more than a behind the scenes look at a haunted house.
“You’re going to shit yourself when you see command central. I’ve set up an entire data center down here. We’ve got one hell of a Beowulf Cluster – twenty-five nodes, baby! Slammin’. The temperature is perfect – no need for a cooling system.”
Jamal was getting a serious nerd-on. It was one of his charms.
“J-Tiz, I love you and your geeky ways, but what we really need is sleep. You can show me nerd-central tomorrow. And by the way, this is Echo and Gabe. Gabe, Echo… this is Jamal Tisdale. We go way back, so he’s safe.”
“Yeah, B and I pre-date the Pentium – ”
I stopped my boy before he got revved up. Thankfully, it didn’t take much. If anything, Jamal was understanding of my needs. He always was. Why I broke it off with the man I’ll never know.
Maybe the Universe was trying to tell me something. If so, the Universe would have to wait until tomorrow before I’d listen.
Chapter 20
November 24, 2016 11:34 AM
Underground City Seattle, Washington
I believe, for the first time in my post-Mengele life, I slept a full twelve hours. The glorious feeling in my head was inversely proportionate to the feeling in my back and legs. I didn’t want to stand. I just wanted to remain horizontal. In corpus delicious. But Jacob had other plans. Waking to his cries made me instantly realize how bad of a mother I had been over the last few days. I had become so focused on getting us safely to Seattle, I forgot to be a mother.
“Good morning my special man. How’s the savior of mankind feeling today?”
Thankfully, Jacob wasn’t aware enough to develop the ego associated with being mankind’s one chance for salvation. The cries issuing from his mouth certainly spoke highly of the standard-issue infantile ego. He was the center of a very tiny universe that would hopefully grow and flourish.
The bottle of formula quickly silenced Jacob’s cries, just in time for Jamal to knock on my door.
“I think we’re going to have to develop some sort of child care down here in Undertown.”
“Undertown? Seriously? You couldn’t come up with a better name? Sounds like something a frat boy would call the package within his tighty whities. Come on, you’ve got to find a better name than that.”
I was mostly teasing Jamal. The man was brilliant – in so many ways. But creativity was not his forte. The man could code in nearly every language known to nerd-kind, could recite Pi (and, on a side note, eat pie) like no one I’d ever known, and his knowledge of security systems far exceeded the sum total knowledge of the NSA. But put a crayon in his hand, and his IQ seemed to plummet back down to mere mortal level.
“It’s my city, I’ll name it what I want. Maybe I’ll just call it Jamaltown.”
Our laughter caused Jacob to spit out his bottle and kick his legs in a frenzy of giggles.
“There’s a meeting about to take place. I’d like you to attend. What do you say?”
The look on the dear man’s face clearly indicated this meeting was of some importance – that and it would probably break his heart if I turned him down.
“I’ll get Echo and Gabe to watch Jacob. You’re right, we need child care. Oh, and health insurance and a 401k.”
*
The meeting room was nothing special, just a large round table with a single laptop. Seated around the laptop were the very friendly faces of complete strangers. They each looked upon me as if I held the keys to the kingdom of heaven and was about to hand said keys over to one lucky person.
First to introduce herself was Morgan Barnhart. She was a wisp of a girl with an adorable face that spoke volumes to a nerd like me. She could make you swoon before you realized she had you under some strange spell that rendered you powerless to resist her charms. Her cohort in crime, Joshua Garcia, was a big man with a ham-sized fist that could crush your skull as he yelled out the lyrics to Avenged Sevenfold songs in a throaty, bear-roar of a voice. He was Chewbacca to Morgan’s Leah.
Yeah, I said it.
We all sat. Jamal stood. There was some irony to the motion I wanted to track down. My brain wasn’t functioning properly at the moment.
“I wanted to bring Bethany in on this meeting mostly because she’ll be involved in about every meeting we’ll have. I’ve made no bones about the fact that she will be the facilitator, and the designer, of all operations from this moment on. If anyone has any objections to that, I suggest you pack up and haul ass. Anyone?”
No one packed up, or hauled ass.
“That’s what I thought. Okay, Morgan, I’d like you to start the meeting off by explaining to Bethany the situation?”
Morgan didn’t bother to stand. She didn’t need to. Her elf-like voice had no problem commanding attention.
“The Zombie Response Team’s mission statement is to protect and sever. We’ve mostly accomplished this by banding together to create the biggest enterprise of individuals ready to fight against the undead, as well as help to educate others. We have formed self contained pockets in all the major cities across the United States. The goal of each pocket is to begin rebuilding those cities and fortifying their defenses against the undead. So far the plan has worked – but not to the extent we’d like. We need a way to help survivors find us.”
Jamal stood back up and interrupted Morgan.
“This is where we think you could help Bethany. You picked up Zombie Radio where the original DJ left off. We have to assume some of his listeners stayed tuned in. If we can harness the power of that medium to guide people to the locations of the ZRT pockets, we think the cities would more easily rebuild.”
The whole of the idea spun around the meat of my mind for a mom
ent. By the time the synaptic dance was concluded, I had one major concern.
“If we broadcast the locations of the ZRT teams, we run the risk of the Zero Day Collective locating and neutralizing them. It can’t work that way. It won’t work that way. To do this right, we’d have to go the opposite route and have the Response Teams go to the survivors.”
Morgan and Joshua started to protest. I silenced them with a raised hand.
“Hear me out first. We announce to listeners to raise a flag to indicate their location. The ZRT teams could then search them out and take them back to their respective cities. That way you eliminate the possibility of the Zero Day Collective locating and destroying each and every Response Team headquarters. It’ll take more time, but the end result will be far greater. I can make the announcement on Zombie Radio; inform everyone to raise a large white flag to let the teams know their whereabouts.”
Everyone at the table took a moment to ponder the idea. There was only one objection, and a strong one at that. Morgan stood and addressed everyone at the table.
“This plan would jeopardize every survivor. You have a bunch of white flags raised and the Zero Day Collective could drop bombs or even drop ships full of the undead.”
Her concern sunk in – deep. She was right. Either way we risk the ZRT teams or the survivors. We were going about this all wrong. I closed my eyes to let all possible outcomes retract to a single point. From that single point, I could follow the path of each solution to see which route offered the most plausible success. It was little more than probability and statistics.
“I use Zombie Radio as a ruse. Morgan, you and Josh contact all ZRT leaders and let them know they are to start searching out survivors and returning them to the safe zones. Not a word of this leaks out through any channel. I will pick up the broadcast on Zombie Radio that the ZRT headquarters have all been overrun with the undead. The teams will then start searching the cities to locate survivors. No flags, no welcome parties. Your men and women will have a harder time locating civilians, but eventually word of mouth will spread and the survivors will be more likely to show themselves. A simple lie, to draw the heat away from your teams.”