Washington Deceased

by Stephen Jones

  “Already sent, sir. It’s a good one.”

  Then they were gone.

  I waited a few seconds to make sure they were clear, and I returned to the elevator. I made it back unseen. I’m confident that Delancy is completely unaware that he was followed.

  (See attached video file, labeled hunting.mp4)

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE PRESIDENT LOOKED up from the tablet and leaned back in her chair. “Dear God.”

  Steele and Ty exchanged a look, and then Ty started around the desk. “Did you want to see the video . . .?”

  “No. I don’t need to see it.”

  Ty hesitated, stepping back. “He returned to his office about fifteen minutes ago. I think he’s in a meeting right now with John Olesson and Gary Hronis.”

  “I don’t care if he’s in a meeting with the ghost of Ronald Reagan – get him in here now.”

  Ty blinked once before turning to leave. “I’ll have him in five.”

  Steele watched Ty rush out of the room. “You were right about him. He’s good.”

  “Maybe I should make him Vice President.”

  Steele couldn’t suppress a smile. When the President looked up at her, though, the smile faded. “Steele, I want you here for this meeting. Knowing Delancy, his first concern will probably be to figure out who followed him, and as good as Ty is, I’d rather have him think it was you.”

  “I agree.”

  “Now the question is: what do we do with him?”

  Steele considered before answering. “I’m almost more concerned with Gillespie. We frankly shouldn’t be surprised at behaviour like this from Delancy, but Gillespie is apparently willing to both endanger his best employees and put the security of our entire complex at risk just to satisfy Delancy’s whims.”

  The President nodded, picked up a pencil and tapped it in frustration. “True. Unfortunately, he just killed his replacement. Marissa Cheung would have been the only real choice. And how do we discipline him? Take away his company car?”

  “I don’t know, Madame President. I really don’t.”

  Steele’s cell phone chirped. She picked it up, heard Ty’s voice. “We’re here.”

  She looked up at the President, who nodded. “Okay, send him in. And Ty, you don’t need to wait around.”

  The office door opened and Delancy entered, crossing the room and dropping his bulk into a groaning metal chair. “What’s this about? I was in the middle of some important negotiations with—”

  The President cut him off. “Sure you weren’t sharing your latest trophy snaps?”

  Delancy’s mouth hung open for a split second before he remembered to close it. “Trophy snaps?”

  As the President stared coolly at Delancy, Steele brought up Ty’s video on her own phone and held it out for him to see.

  “By God, I know this one – this dipshit tried to filibuster a bill I sponsored once.”

  “We knew you’d like that one, sir.”

  Steele asked, “Do I need to keep going?”

  “No, I think I got it.”

  Steele stabbed at the phone screen as the sound of bullets popped out of the tiny speaker. Delancy turned his gaze from the phone to Steele and then to the President. “So, what – are you spying on all of us now, or just me?”

  With a chill in her voice, the President answered, “No, just you, Bob. You’re the only one who’s been disappearing for long stretches of time with a woman who recently turned up infected with HRV and who’s now dead.”

  “Now, that’s not my fault.”

  “Really? So you weren’t there when—” The President paused to pull the tablet closer to her and scroll briefly through the report. “—Cheung accidentally stepped to the edge of the loading dock and was scratched on the ankle?”

  Delancy’s eyes narrowed. “Well, you got the whole goddamn story, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, Bob, we did.” She pushed the tablet away, rose from her chair and turned furiously on Delancy. “What the hell were you thinking? You put our people in danger – you killed the best analyst we had left – just so you could have your own private shooting gallery? Can you imagine what kind of damage this story could do if it got out?”

  Delancy didn’t stand as he shouted back, “Got out to who? In case you hadn’t noticed, we don’t exactly have to worry much about the press any more. Or foreign intelligence. Or some douchebag kid who thinks he’ll be a hero if he gives our secrets away. In fact, about the only thing I can see that we have left to worry about is some zombie king named Moreby, and I hope to Christ he does hear about it! Let him know that not all of us are ready to roll over and hand our country to him just yet.”

  “Is that what you think we’re doing, Bob?”

  Now he did rise. “All I know is we’ve been down here for weeks now, and all I see happening is you giving out jobs to used-up losers like Ty Ward. Oh, and don’t think I’m so dumb that I don’t know it was him who followed me. That’s his tablet on your desk, Madame President. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to my meeting so that some of us with a little fire in our bellies can figure a way out of this mess.”

  Delancy strode from the office.

  Steele rose and started after him. “Do you want me to bring him back?”

  “No. Let him go.”

  Steele closed the door and looked back to see the President sagging into her chair, hand to her chin in her characteristic manner. “He’s right.”

  “How so?”

  “We have spent too long talking and planning and wasting time, while our enemies have evolved and expanded their hold.”

  Steele didn’t like the direction this conversation might take. She prided herself on caution; it was how she’d built her career. She’d never been an impulsive person; she’d always taken time to analyse every possible manoeuvre, every potential outcome. She’d stopped assassins and broken counterfeiting rings that way. When she’d rescued this President, she’d even predicted how many men and women she’d lose in the attempt, and had been off by only one.

  She saw a loss of 100 per cent if they took military action against the zombies now.

  The President must have seen Steele’s trepidation and guessed rightly at its source. “Don’t worry, Steele, we’re not going to rush into anything. But we need to push Ames Parker harder.”

  Steele exhaled in relief. “That we can do.”

  “Oh, and send Gillespie to see me. I’m going to tell him that if he can’t get Landen Jones to tell us everything he knows about Moreby, they’ll both be spending twelve hours a day brewing coffee in the cafeteria.”

  Steele grinned. “You got it, ma’am.”

  As she left the office, Steele still thought they were on their way to a devastating loss, but at least they wouldn’t slowly starve to death buried half-a-mile under the ground and forgotten by history.

  If there was any history still to come.

  Chapter Fourteen

  TY TOOK ANOTHER sip of vodka, refilled his glass and stared again at the computer screen.

  hunting. mp4

  It would be so easy . . .

  The idea had come to him ten minutes ago, as the clock had passed midnight and he’d slipped fully into drunkenness.

  Post the video. Make it public.

  It would solve the Delancy problem. Steele and the President would be blameless and could focus on other, more important issues.

  Parts of the Internet were still operating; there were enough protected and powered nodes that it worked, although it was slower than it had been. Many of the major pre-HRV sites were gone, but others hung on; Ty wondered if they were completely automated, or had hordes of dedicated nerds who’d simply refused to leave their desks for something as minor as the end of the world.

  He’d already checked, and learned that the major video-sharing site was still online. He clicked on it again and it came right up. He had an account there because he’d once posted a video of Ben making a touchdown for his school’s footb
all team. The account read “UncleMan”, and fed to an email account that also didn’t include Ty’s name. Of course it would take a real hacker only minutes to trace it back to him . . . but he wasn’t sure there were any real hackers left.

  All he had to do was hit the UPLOAD button.

  His gaze drifted down from that temptation to the “Most Popular” section. Because he was drunk, and because it was late at night and he was preoccupied with the thought of possibly betraying his country’s Vice President, it took him a few seconds to realize what he was seeing.

  Every one of the “Most Popular” videos featured zombies.

  Curious, he clicked on the first one, something called “Zombie Sings the Blues”. It took several minutes for the video to load and begin playing, and Ty saw a shaky, phonecam image of what looked like the interior of a barn. A zombie was chained to the unpainted wooden wall; it had been a wiry man in his forties, with cropped hair and flannel shirt, but now it was a gaunt spectre with gaping mouth and grasping, claw-like fingers. In the background, rap music played, the bass throbbing.

  A young man stepped into the frame. He wore a butcher’s apron over his sweats and a welder’s mask, the visor already down. “You ready for this?” he asked the camera, grinning.

  He lifted a chainsaw up and yanked the starter rope several times until the engine caught to noisy life.

  As Ty watched, he felt the vodka’s pleasant haze draining away. The young man turned to the squirming zombie and used the chainsaw to sever its left arm. Dark liquid gushed from the stump and the camera tilted down to the arm, still wriggling on the barn’s dirt floor, until a boot kicked it away.

  The image came back to the man, now covered in the zombie’s blood, as he severed the other arm and then went to work on the torso. Clotted blood and tissue flew as the spinning blade bit into the stomach; the chainsaw man stepped back and throttled the chainsaw down so he could be heard whooping as blue and grey intestines spilled out, sliding down the zombie’s legs to the floor. The zombie looked down, its mouth twisting in either shock or pain.

  The butcher made a motion to the camera – an upheld finger, promising one more magic moment – and then revved the chainsaw again and raised it. This time he sawed the zombie’s head from its neck, sending it tumbling. When he was done, he turned off the chainsaw, set it aside, and ripped the welder’s mask free and dropped it. He bent down out of frame, and when he came up again he was holding the zombie’s head.

  He walked it forward, so it took up most of the image. The head was still alive, the mouth moving. The butcher shouted, “Hey, Mikey, turn down that fuckin’ noise!” The rap music died and the butcher moved the head even closer to the camera.

  Now a faint sound could be heard from the mouth; because there was no larynx or vocal cords attached, what would probably have been wailing came out as an eerie, toneless rush of air, like the sound of wind through distant trees.

  “Ain’t that a kick?” said the butcher. He put his face next to the zombie’s and widened his grin.

  Ty hit the video player’s PAUSE button. He felt nauseous and knew it wasn’t the vodka. He didn’t need to see what the young man and his friends finally did to the severed head.

  He clicked the BACK arrow, returning to the site’s main page, and glanced at the “Most Popular” videos again. He already knew, though, without watching any of them, that they were all like this one.

  He did vomit, then. When it was over, he sat on his bunk, weak and shaken, and turned his computer off.

  Because he knew if he released the Delancy video into that world, the man would be a hero.

  [Confidential NWP Memo from Dr Brewster Gilray to W. Leonard Paryder, Senior Controller (East), Saturday July 20]

  MEMO

  Dear Ward:

  I’m sorry to report that we’ve hit a wall with the HRV vaccine research. We’ve tried every variant:

  1) Live, attenuated – we were unable to prepare a strain that did not infect the human host. We even attempted one in which we passaged the virus through 300 cell cultures, but the virus never lost the ability to replicate in human cells.

  2) Inactivated – we were, put simply, unable to kill HRV. We tried heat, formaldehyde, some chemical cocktails that should have killed anything . . . but HRV wouldn’t die.

  3) Recombinant vector – this showed the most promise, and I still believe it might be possible to create a vaccine in this fashion. We did manage to isolate the protein in HRV, and when introduced into an attenuated adenovirus, initial results seemed good. Volunteer test subject #89 was vaccinated, and then received a bite from one of the infected. The subject showed no signs of HRV for the first 72 hours . . . but then the disease progressed quickly, and the subject had to be terminated.

  I probably don’t need to add that we’ve tried various dosages. In the case of live vaccines, the size of the dosage seemed to make little difference, and we’re frankly still trying to understand the processes by which HRV replicates so efficiently.

  If we had another three years, we could also investigate production of a DNA vaccine. But the fact is . . . we don’t have three years. I doubt if we have one year.

  Ward, we’re out of everything. Are you still in touch with Landen? We need everything from more volunteers/test subjects to plain old food rations. It’s bad enough that we all live at one of NWP’s facilities now, but we ARE running out of food and drinking water. And security could use a boost, too. Tell Landen to lobby his friends in DC (if he still has any) to get us what we need. We could at least keep going. Right now we have nothing. This could be the only time I have ever hoped that one of our competitors is ahead of us.

  Brewster

  Chapter Fifteen

  KEVIN HAD BEEN driving for an hour on the 95 heading north when he pulled up to the roadblock.

  In the past, he might have approached a line of military vehicles with sweating palms. In LA, he’d once encountered a police checkpoint late on a Saturday night, searching for drunken motorists; fortunately, his last beer had been three hours earlier and the cops had waved him on through. Even sober, it’d been enough to set his heart pounding.

  But today he approached with cautious optimism. The trucks lined up across the road were plainly military, as were the young soldiers who stood before them. Even their rifles – which in the past would have intimidated him into turning around and going the other way – gave him a measure of comfort.

  He pulled the Hummer to a stop and three soldiers approached. The one on the driver’s side made a motion and Kevin rolled down his window. The soldier was younger than Kevin, barely twenty; he had acne-scarred skin, blonde fuzz and mirrored sunglasses he didn’t remove.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “’Morning to you,” Kevin said, trying to sound as friendly as possible.

  “Can we ask where you’re headed?”

  “I’m not sure. I came from California to see a friend in Virginia, but . . . that didn’t work out. Guess I’m just trying to find a place to stay now.”

  The young soldier saw something that made him frown, and he walked back three steps, lowering the rifle just enough to let Kevin know he was serious. “Can I ask you to get out of the vehicle, sir?”

  Kevin’s confidence vanished. He was starting to shake as he undid his seat belt, opened the door and got out of the Hummer. The soldier waved his friends over, and together they all peered at Kevin’s face.

  The scratches. Of course.

  “How’d you get those?” That was one of the others, a wiry man who seemed closer to forty.

  “It’s okay – I’m not infected.”

  The blonde kid’s jaw tightened. “Answer the question, sir.”

  “The friend in Virginia gave them to me.”

  The older man asked, “Was that friend alive or dead?”

  Kevin’s mouth opened, but he couldn’t find an answer.

  All three soldiers tensed. “I’m going to have to ask you to come with us,” the blonde boy
said, motioning away with the rifle barrel.

  Kevin looked where he was pointing, and saw that one of the trucks seemed to be filled with people. He glimpsed pale, desperate faces peering out the back; some were obviously very sick, while others were still well enough to regard the armed soldiers below them with fear.

  “No, I’m not—”

  The older man lowered his gun. “Get to the truck now.”

  Kevin thrust out his hand, and all three men instantly leveled their rifles at him. He didn’t care; he hadn’t come all this way and survived to climb into a truck with sick victims who were probably bound for a convenient trench and an early meeting with those rifles. “No, no, look at this – this bite, I got it more than three weeks ago from a dead woman, and I haven’t developed any symptoms, I’m—”

  A rifle barrel in his armpit interrupted. It was the third man, who hadn’t spoken so far; now that he did, his voice was thick with both a rural accent and uncompromising iron. “Sure, and I’m the tooth fairy. Now get your ass to that fuckin’ truck.”

  “I swear, I’m immune! Don’t you get it? I’m immune to HRV—”

  The blonde boy placed the barrel of his rifle up against Kevin’s head. “Or you could be one of those new smart ones, in which case we’d be perfectly justified in shooting you right here.”

  “‘Smart ones’? What does that mean?”

  A push from behind sent Kevin sprawling. He looked back up to see the older one standing over him, leering. “Haven’t you heard? We got zombies who can think now, and maybe you’re one of those.”

  Kevin gulped, trying to grasp what he was hearing – the zombies can think? “That’s fucked up, but I’m—”

  The man who’d pushed him cut him off. “You got five seconds to get to your feet and start walking. One . . . two . . . three . . .”

  Scrambling to his feet, Kevin started stumbling back. “You guys are making a big mistake—”

  He barely noticed a fourth soldier approaching until he heard a feminine voice. “What’s going on here?” He looked more carefully at the new arrival and saw a young woman appraising the scene. The other soldiers pulled back slightly. “Just trying to get this infected to join the others, Sarge.”