Zombie D.O.A. Series Five: The Complete Series Five

by JJ Zep

  “Spare me the billboard,” Ruby said. “Haul the kid up.”

  “Does that mean you’ll join our little company? Excellent, I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to have you on board.”

  “Just haul the kid up,” Ruby said.

  “You heard the lady,” Cain said, addressing Gold Tooth. “Get the brat up here.”

  He allowed himself a little chuckle. “Ruby and Pearl,” he said. “Two precious things. You two belong together.”

  twelve

  Charlie sat up on his bunk, swung his feet to the ground and hunched over in the dark. He pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, squeezed his eyes tightly shut and tried to banish the last remnants of weariness. Had he slept? He wasn’t sure. If he had, it had been a fitful half-sleep that was of very little use in replenishing the batteries.

  His mind drifted again to the conundrums that had plagued him during the night. The situation at Pendleton was, of course, worrying. But Charlie was sure that order would soon be restored. There were a lot of good men serving there, even if their commander-in-chief was a walking hemorrhoid.

  What concerned Charlie more were the mysteriously disappearing Z’s and the equally mysterious clicking sounds he’d heard on the radio. Neither made sense, although Galvin had come up with a viable explanation for the second. The Z buzz was transmitted at a certain frequency, Galvin suggested, so perhaps the strange clicking noise made by the Quicks had a frequency of its own. Somehow those clicks had bled into the band the military was using. It was a stretch sure, but easier to accept than Pasquali’s ludicrous suggestion that maybe the Z’s had learned to use the radio.

  So if that explained the clicks on the radio, what then of the vanished Z’s? Charlie had spent half the night worrying at that problem. He’d come up with an idea that he thought made sense.

  He knew from his experience in Mexicali, that the quicks somehow used those weird, clicking sounds to communicate. What if the clicks on the radio were some kind of message? What if they were an instruction, telling the Z’s to go…

  Where? To go where?

  Charlie didn’t know that yet, but he was determined to find out. Today he was going to run patrols to the outer reaches of the town, beyond if necessary. This mystery needed to be resolved. Something told him it was important.

  He reached for the pack of Marlboros on the bedside table, shook one out and popped it into his mouth. He sat for a while without lighting up, tasting the tang of stale tobacco on his tongue. Then he removed the cigarette and slotted it back into the pack. When cigarettes had been hard to come by, the nicotine craving had driven him up the wall. With Morales now providing a regular supply, he found that he hardly smoked at all.

  Thinking about Tico Morales got him wondering if he should let Tico know about the latest developments. Probably not. This was a military matter, not one to get civilians involved in.

  He stood and walked to the wash basin on bare feet, splashed some water on his face. Minutes later he was buttoning his shirt as he walked down the school corridor, exited into the parking lot and crossed towards the admin building. He was halfway across the lot when he heard shouting from the main gate.

  Charlie veered right, heading in that direction.

  The night had begun to give up its hold on darkness. He could see the sentry, pale faced and uncertain at the barrage being directed at him from the other side of the gate.

  “Open the goddamn gate, ass wipe. You make me climb over and tear myself up on this razor wire and I’m going to rip off your head and use it for a doorstop.”

  Charlie would have recognized that voice anywhere.

  thirteen

  “You shouldn’t have done it, Riley.”

  “Why the fuck not?” Wackjob said around a mouthful of corned beef hash. He took a slug from his coffee mug, grimaced, and then got back to work on the contents of his mess can. “Good chow this.”

  Charlie looked around the small classroom that served as a mess. The rest of his men were filing in for breakfast, some of them already sitting down to eat. He dropped his voice.

  “Last I heard the penalty for desertion was still summary execution. You shouldn’t have done it.”

  Wackjob scraped up the last remnants of his meal, spooned it into his mouth, licked the spoon, then allowed it to clatter into the mess can. He patted down his shirtfront and produced a battered pack of Camels, shook out half a cigarette and lit up.

  “Gee Loot,” he said through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “I thought you’d be happy to see me.”

  “I am happy to see you. That’s not the point. What do you think is going to happen when they find you gone? What do you think they’ll do when they catch up with you?”

  “Fuck ‘em,” Wackjob said. He picked a loose scrap of tobacco from his tongue, inspected it.

  “And you realize that if I let you stay, I’m as culpable as you are.”

  Wackjob looked back at Charlie. He seemed about to say something but didn’t. Instead he directed his gaze towards the window and looked out into the schoolyard.

  “You’re probably right,” he said eventually. “My bad. I shouldn’t have come.” He dropped the cigarette butt to the floor and squashed it out with the toe of his boot. Then he pushed back in his chair and started to rise.

  “Sit the fuck down,” Charlie said, and when Wackjob hesitated. “Quit being a pussy. Sit down and let’s talk.”

  Wackjob dropped himself back into the seat, patted himself down for another cigarette and came up empty. Charlie slid his own pack across the table. “Keep them,” he said.

  Wackjob shook out a cigarette and lit up immediately, exhaled a stream of smoke into the air with obvious enjoyment.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” Charlie said. “You can stay. God knows I could use your help around here. But you stay out of trouble and you be sure and keep out of sight if we get anyone here from Pendleton. Deal?”

  “Deal,” Wackjob said. “Wouldn’t hold my breath on any visits from Pendleton though. Pendleton’s pretty much cooked.”

  “How so?” The comment startled Charlie. Jojo had, of course, hinted at trouble last night, but Charlie had never thought that the situation was beyond redemption. He’d assumed the opposite in fact.

  “We got ourselves a civil war up at Pendleton, chief. Harrow versus the shack people. Only that’s not even right, half the military’s gone over onto the other side, under Colonel Duma.”

  “Jesus!”

  “You said it.”

  “How did things get this bad?”

  “It all started with Harrow’s little work program,” Wackjob said. “At first, folks were pretty much willing to go along. An honest days work for protection and regular chow, who wouldn’t right? Thing is, Harrow’s idea of an honest days work was 12 hours in the field on starvation rations and very little water. So pretty soon you’ve got your work force dropping like flies, a few of them even dying of heatstroke. Then, when their leaders asked for a sit down, you know, to figure out a better way of doing things, Harrow refused. He sent in Litherland’s fucking stormtroopers, put the workers under armed guard. Only took a few more deaths and then, kaboom!”

  “And you’re saying that Duma’s come out on the side of the workers?”

  “Him and a few others.”

  “What about Jojo?”

  “Still standing firm.”

  “And our guys? K-Mart, Mons –”

  “All but Greg and JC have teamed up with Duma. I was planning on doing the same myself, but then I figured I was better off out of the whole thing. Didn’t want to be there when the shooting starts, brother against brother and all that. That’s when I took off.”

  “So there’s been no fighting yet?”

  “A couple of isolated skirmishes, but that’ll change.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “It’s Harrow, boss. Things can only get worse.”

  fourteen

  General Bob Harrow stood at the head of the c
onference table, the pointer in his hand tapping out a staccato rhythm as he picked out points on the roughly drawn map that illustrated his battle plan. He turned back to the room and cast a wild-eyed gaze over his assembled officer corps, as though daring them to challenge him. No one did, although Jojo was sure that he wasn’t the only one who thought that Harrow’s plan was insane. What he was proposing amounted to the genocide of every man, woman and child in the Pendleton shantytown.

  “The key to all this is to hit hard and fast,” Harrow continued, “We do this right and we’ll crush any resistance, not just now but for the foreseeable future. We need to show these reprobates who’s boss, need to show them who they’re fucking with.”

  He laid his pointer down on the counter and looked back across the room, eyes agleam, face flushed. “Any questions?” he said, as though he fully expected none to be asked.

  For a long moment, nobody spoke. As unobtrusively as he could, Jojo cast his eye around the table. There were some good men gathered here, Terry, Schulman, Araujo, among them. There were others though – Blackwell, Litherland, Grunewald – who he didn’t trust. They’d go along with whatever Harrow said, and were likely to execute his orders with a zeal that went beyond mere obedience. Jojo could see the ecclesiastical grin on Grunewald’s face, Blackwell rocking in his chair like a nodding dog, his expression fixed. They were the senior officers in the room and they certainly were not going to speak up against Harrow.

  What about you then? You going to sit there and allow this megalomaniac to commit mass murder? You going to be a good Nazi, just following orders?

  Jojo recognized that voice that spoke in his mind. As always, the voice of his conscience was that of his father.

  What you gonna do, Joe?

  Nothing. He was going to do nothing, like everyone else. He was a soldier after all, and soldiers obeyed orders, even orders they might not personally agree with.

  Orders, son? Is that the way I raised you? If I’d obeyed orders, I’d have stayed in New York, abandoned Ruby to her fate, left your mother to be killed and eaten by the Dead Men in Oklahoma.

  Shut up, Jojo told the voice. Shut up and let me think.

  No time to think, son. Time to act. Do what’s right, son.

  What difference would it make?

  The difference between life and death for a lot of people maybe.

  “I’m glad I have your backing on this, gentlemen.” Harrow’s voice was choked with emotion. “A general is only as good as the officers serving under him. And right now I’m about as proud of you all as I can be. It is an honor to serve as your commander in –”

  “General, I have a question,” Jojo cut in.

  fifteen

  “Hey you! Yeah you, Gumby, eyes up and quit daydreaming. You keep your goddamn eyes on them buildings. Anything moves in there I want to hear about it, understand? I find a Z chowing down on my shinbone before I hear your warning and I’m popping a cap in your dumb ass. You got that?”

  Charlie allowed himself a wry chuckle. Wackjob hadn’t taken long to introduce himself to the men. Right now he was at the rear of the column, directing operations, like he was General Patton at the Battle of the Bulge.

  Despite his earlier reservations, Charlie was glad that Wackjob was here. Of the original sixteen men under his command, Charlie had lost four, and while Fagan and Brunsden were no loss, Hedrick and Feng were (especially Feng, who’d been one of the few combat trained soldiers he’d had). Add to that Galvin, hobbling around on his injured leg, and Charlie was seriously short-handed. Having Wackjob around certainly helped.

  The patrol they’d run had taken them in a wide circuit of the town, east to Evergreen Cemetery, as far north as the Mid-Winter Showground. Now they were cutting in from the western perimeter heading towards the burnt out husk of the medical center, and the I-8 beyond that.

  Charlie wasn’t sure what exactly he’d expected to find on this little excursion, but if it was a clue as to what had happened to the zombies, he’d been sorely disappointed. Aside from a few desiccated corpses, they’d encountered not a single Z on the streets of El Centro. It was as though the entire undead population had headed out of town for a zombie conference in Vegas.

  He walked his men for another half mile, then called a break and set up a perimeter in the shade of the Imperial Avenue overpass. There he removed the I-Pod from his breast pocket, turned it on and spun the wheel to the track marked “PIED PIPER.” He pressed the play button and heard a discordant jangle spill from the earphones. If anything would pull the Z’s out of whatever hole they’d crept into, it was the Piper.

  As he’d done at various points during the patrol, Charlie ran the frequency for a few minutes then turned the player off, preserving battery life. As before, not a single Z had been drawn out of hiding.

  This was insane, frightening even. Where the hell had they all gone? Maybe if he got up onto the overpass, scanned through the glasses, maybe he’d spot something.

  A volley of laughter drew his attention to where the men were clustered, Wackjob regaling them with some or other tale.

  Charlie shook his head and grinned. He walked out from under the bridge into bright sunlight. Left of him stood an apartment complex painted a sun-faded pink, a Denny’s restaurant, an oasis of palm trees. To his right, beyond the embankment, stood a cluster of dilapidated bungalows behind a semi-collapsed chain link fence.

  The embankment was steep and covered in shale that slipped under his boots. By the time Charlie stepped onto the road he was drenched in sweat. He narrowed his eyes and scanned south, then east and west along I-8. Nothing moved out there except the faintest of breezes stirring the weeds and scrub grass.

  He needed a better vantage point and picked one out, an ancient camper among the endless line of long dead cars. Charlie worked his way between the vehicles and crossed the center island to the westbound lane. The van had a ladder fixed to its side paneling and he used that to hoist himself up onto the flat roof. Bringing the glasses to his eyes he scanned south, running his gaze between the houses on the other side of the highway. Tumbleweeds turned in lazy circles along a street and he saw a coyote hunting among the scrub. Other than heat devils wavering on baked tarmac, there was no other movement.

  Scanning the glasses east along the I-8 produced a similar result and there was nothing going on out west either.

  Charlie was just about to call it a day when a high-pitched whistle drew his attention back to the embankment he’d climbed earlier. Wackjob was standing there, pointing east, back along the highway.

  Charlie raised the glasses to his eyes, lowered them to street level, ran them along the line of wrecks. Now he picked up what Wackjob had seen, a tall, dark-haired man stumbling along the road, weaving between the cars.

  Z or human? Charlie couldn’t be sure. He zoomed in with the glasses. The man appeared to have a serious neck wound, the front of his shirt literally black with blood. He had to be a Z then. No way could anyone survive a wound like that, not out here, not in this heat, not without water.

  Charlie allowed the glasses to rest on their strap against his chest. He brought his rifle up to his shoulder and sighted along the barrel, drawing a bead on the man’s forehead. He applied gentle pressure on the trigger and then stopped. The man had raised his arm. He was waving.

  sixteen

  At first Harrow looked confused. Cut off in mid-sentence he seemed to freeze, to contemplate the unexpected intrusion. He half-turned towards the whiteboard, turned back towards the room, eyes blinking in a myopic flurry. For a moment, he seemed to be wrestling with some incomprehensible problem. Then he ran his gaze along the row of faces at the table and picked out the source of the intrusion. He seemed almost relieved that it was Jojo.

  “Major Collins?”

  “Sir?”

  “You have a question?”

  “Yes sir.” Jojo cleared his throat, looked left and right at the expressionless faces of his fellow officers. He was suddenly acutely aware that
he was the most junior man in the room. Why the hell am I doing this, he thought. Why couldn’t I have just kept my big mouth shut?

  “Well, what is it?” Harrow’s tone was sharp.

  “I was just, um, wondering sir, if we’ve really explored all the options. Does it really make sense to inflame a situation that might be resolved by negotiation?”

  “Negotiation?” Harrow all but spat. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

  “Of course,” Jojo said, feeling cowered.

  Let it go, Joe, he told himself. Don’t, his father’s voice responded.

  “It’s just…”

  Harrow had been turning back to the whiteboard. He spun round and regarded Jojo with a face like thunder.

  “Yes?” he demanded.

  “Well sir, I don’t really see the benefit of fighting among ourselves. Especially when we’re all facing a common enemy.”

  “We are not fighting among ourselves, Major. Colonel Duma declared himself an enemy of the Corporation when he decided on his treasonous path. He and his rabble are every bit as dangerous as the common enemy you describe, more so even. They are a cancer, Major, a cancer that must be excised and exterminated. Our very survival depends on it. Now, if there are no further questions.” He turned away from Jojo, back to the room.

  “Actually there are,” Jojo said. The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them. The minute he said them he realized that he’d made a mistake. He should have let this ride, snuck out in the middle of the night and warned Duma of the attack to come. Instead here he was, going toe to toe with General Harrow, calling him out in front of his men. He might just as well have printed his name on a death warrant and signed it with a flourish.

  Harrow, hands on hips, stood at the head of the table and glared at him. Jojo was committed now. This was not going to end well. Might as well go for broke.