“Lady, even if I wanted to answer your questions, I’d have a hard time deciding where to start. You’re all over the map.”
“Just tell me what you’re doing here.” She held out her microphone.
McDaniels paused for a long moment, then said, “I’ve come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I’m all out of bubble gum.” With that, he pushed through the crowd and walked toward one of the Humvees.
Gartrell leaned against its rear quarter panel. “Did I just hear you quote a line from John Carpenter’s They Live? If you’re a fan, then I’m ashamed to confess we might actually have a common interest.” Gartrell looked toward the line of traffic, the terrified civilians, and the almost bored-looking special operators.
McDaniels ignored the quip. “Mind telling me why you snapped your cap and went hands-on with that stench?”
Gartrell sighed and turned his gaze toward McDaniels. “When I saw it was a kid, I guess I kind of lost it. To tell you the truth, Colonel, after having to pop that kid in New York... well, it’s left me kind of fucked up in the mental machinations department.” He tapped the side of his head with one finger.
McDaniels leaned next to Gartrell. “I’m sorry that happened to you, Gartrell. But you couldn’t have known the lightfighters were just around the corner.”
“The kid was autistic. Couldn’t even understand what was going on. He just wanted his mother, who was being eaten alive a few feet away from him. Thank God for the darkness, so he couldn’t see it. His last moments were full of horror and pain. I’d kind of hoped, you know, that things might have ended up differently.” Gartrell put a hand on the back of his neck and slowly moved his head from side to side. “Maybe you feel the same way about the kid in the Tahoe. Different set of circumstances, but the same result. At least the kid you shot was already on the way out and probably didn’t know a thing.”
McDaniels didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t bother trying to come up with something witty or pithy. And the truth was, he hadn’t even really thought about the toddler before he raised his rifle and pulled the trigger. He obviously recognized the necessity of it—the child had been bitten, was within moments of dying from arterial bleed out, and would reanimate as a necromorph—so there wasn’t a lot of internal debate to be had. He did wish it could have ended differently, but it hadn’t. And McDaniels wasn’t sure what that would mean for him emotionally once he tried to go to sleep later.
The two men watched as the van was towed out of the traffic and pulled out into the desert. The Special Forces troops went through it and pulled all the paperwork they could find, then tossed a white phosphorus grenade into the back. The blue van went up in flames, and it would blaze away for the better part of an hour.
“All right, let’s get back to the camp,” McDaniels told Gartrell. He waved to Rawlings and Switchblade.
Gartrell grunted. “Yeah, all this field work has made me suddenly grow fonder of Colonel Jaworski’s rather adroit PowerPoint sessions.”
“Give the man a break. He does use some really great clip art.”
“Yeah, well, I guess everyone has to have a hobby.”
25
Andrew Kerr studied the results of the latest trials through bleary eyes. All the staffers and consultants and virologists had been working around the clock for days trying to synthesize Wolf Safire’s vaccine, and even though Safire had outlined the processes required, there was still a good deal of work to be done to realize the treatment. Kerr’s own efforts had been the tipping point. Since he had worked with a bug that was very, very similar to RMA 2, he’d been able to make the conceptual leaps required to bring the process closer to fruition. And that had meant a great deal of declined sleep, something Kerr wasn’t exactly used to. Adding to that, the noise outside the research building was reaching a crescendo. Helicopters came and went, vehicles entered and exited the compound, construction equipment rattled, and soldiers of all ranks scurried, further securing the objective called SPARTA. Kerr was used to working in a less harried environment, and he found the excess noise distracting.
Distractions aside, they had made fantastic progress over the past week and a half. Phenomenal progress, actually. Even though Kerr and Wolf Safire had been something akin to rivals, the portly scientist had to give the late virologist his due. He had captured the essence of RMA 2, managed to identify one of the three mysterious proteins that allowed it to work when exposed to living DNA, and his work had been the roadmap that led to the blocking of that protein from adhering to cellular walls. The results of over fifty scientific trials had proven that out, and even better, RMA 2 died in less than twenty-four hours if it couldn’t interact with the host’s cells.
In short, the folks at InTerGen had managed to formulate an effective vaccine.
He compared his analysis with that of Doctor Kersey, the senior scientist from the fallen USAMRIID. It took several hours just to go over the essential baselines and confirm they conformed to the standard testing practices, and then the rest of the day to validate the actual results. Kersey approached the work in a very pedagogic manner, reviewing each step in order to relate it to the results. But finally, after the sun had set and then risen again, she pushed back from her workstation and looked at Kerr with bloodshot eyes.
“Congratulations, Andrew,” she said. “You did it.”
“Actually, everyone else did. I just pushed things along here and there.” False modesty wasn’t in Kerr’s arsenal of people skills. While he didn’t devalue his own efforts, he hadn’t done everything in a vacuum. “But let’s not break out the champagne and caviar just yet. Let’s get this thing into production.” As he spoke, he heard the crackle of gunfire in the distance.
The zombies were coming.
***
The miles slowly passed beneath the worn soles of Dead Jeffries’s boots.
It hadn’t eaten in days, electing to forgo the hunt and continue walking westward. Behind it, thousands of Others followed, approaching the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. Already, flames and smoke reached into the sky, for ahead, over a million Others advanced before them, overwhelming all defenders and consuming all prey in their path. Soon, another great city would fall to the horde.
Dead Jeffries had a vague picture in its mind, an image of an office park it had visited in another lifetime.
That place was where Dead Jeffries and the Others marched.
There, Dead Jeffries and the Others would end their hunt.
—To Be Continued In —
THE RISING HORDE
Volume Two
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007YT8UJI
The Rising Horde, Volume One (Sequel to The Gathering Dead ) Page 28