“But, if it works . . . you’ll be . . .”
“No, I won’t. Because if it works, the second shot will be for me. And if it doesn’t work, I’ll be here to guard him.”
Moreby began to rustle under the cowl. Dawson jerked back and pointed the gun at Moreby’s head. “Get out, Steele – now!”
Steele stepped back and closed the door, sliding the heavy bar into place. She paused there, listening. She thought she heard the sound of the gun firing, but she couldn’t be sure.
She stayed a few more minutes before turning to go. At the entrance to the storage area, she turned off the lights, closed the door and tested the lock.
It was done for now.
MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT
OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
My fellow Americans,
Today, America is renewed. We’ve come through the darkest storm clouds and we can, at last, see a future of light and promise.
I’m pleased to inform you that our great enemy, the zombie President James Moreby, is no more. Approximately eighteen hours ago, Moreby was taken by a special team under the leadership of Ty Ward, and has been placed in a maximum security facility. Without Moreby’s direction, his forces are in disarray, and within the last day our forces have successfully retaken many key locations, including San Francisco, Chicago, and Providence. Here in Washington, we are in the process of securing the White House once again, and we hope to have the American Government reinstalled in that most significant of landmarks within days.
The tide has turned. We have new drugs that are helping us to survive HRV, and we have already begun distribution of these drugs on a mass scale.
I know most of you hearing or reading this have suffered immense losses; we all have. I myself have lost my husband, my daughter, and many others who were dear to me. But I’ve survived, as you have, and now I’m very proud to be able to lead this great nation into a new era of hope, as we come together and rebuild.
It’s not over yet; I know that. We have almost unimaginable hurdles in front of us. We have cities to reconstruct, roads to clear, mouths to feed, and hearts to heal. We don’t know yet the full extent of HRV infection around the world. As much as we could mutually benefit with help from our neighbours, we may have to move ahead alone, at least at first.
So I must ask more of you. I know you’re all exhausted, hungry, heartsick. But if we can all endure just a few more days, life will begin again. Don’t let down your guards yet – our foe is still plentiful, strong, and intent on defeating us. But without their leader – who we now believe was also the creator of HRV itself – they cannot win.
The end is near . . . and the end is victory.
Good night, and God bless the United States of America.
Chapter Fifty-Two
AS STEELE HELPED the President pack up the office, she was surprised to realize she might actually miss this concrete-and-steel, sunless tomb that had been their home for far too long.
She knew there was still a chance they’d be returning to it; the situation around the country was still far from stable. When their troops had returned to the White House yesterday, two of Moreby’s ministers couldn’t be accounted for. But the zombie army was in a shambles; the human fighters had moved quickly to take advantage of the living dead’s disorientation, and they’d absolutely secured the White House. By the end of today, they’d have a real President – a human President – back in the Oval Office.
There was, however, one other reason Steele would be glad to leave the OC: there were fresh rumours about sounds coming from the end of the complex around the storage room. Even though they’d concreted up the hidden entrance and sealed off the entire block of rooms and corridors, people working in surrounding offices or trying to sleep in their quarters said they heard the distant echoes of inhuman shrieks. Little Maxi, playing in a corridor that was some distance from the storage room, came back terrified, saying he’d heard not one but two voices screaming.
Steele loaded more files into a box and tried to push those thoughts away. Moreby was done; and even if he wasn’t, there was no way he could have been heard through the walls surrounding the secret room. No, it was coincidence, or another urban legend . . .
“Oh my God. Steele, look at this.” The President pushed her tablet towards Steele, who set down the latest handful of Manila folders and picked it up.
On the screen was a press release from New World Pharmaceuticals. They were pleased to announce that they’d just concluded negotiations with the Chinese, and would shortly be relocating their personnel and operations to Beijing.
“Wow,” Steele said, as she finished reading the email, “talk about sore losers.”
“How are you at other languages? Think we need to start learning Chinese?”
Steele smiled. “If they still had an army to worry about, they would’ve taken us over already.”
“True.” The President reclaimed the tablet, glanced through the rest of her messages, and leaned back in her desk chair with a long, exhausted sigh. “There’s still so much to do. Just getting food to people is going to be hard for a while, and medical care . . .”
“Well,” said Steele, “look on the bright side: maybe you can finally put through your proposal for universal healthcare.”
The President burst into laughter, and Steele was glad; she hadn’t seen the woman laugh in weeks, and that had worried her.
They were still chuckling when the office door opened and Ty Ward entered.
Steele blinked in surprise. She hadn’t seen Ty since yesterday, when she’d checked on him in his quarters. He’d been in bed, looking pasty and feeble, but had assured her he was feeling better. Now he was upright and walking . . .
But he was walking stiffly, and his face had regained none of its old colour. His eyes were rheumy, and when he finally spoke his voice sounded hollow. “Steele, we need to talk.”
“Sit down, Ty.” She motioned to a chair, but he hesitated, his eyes moving from her to the President and away.
He was afraid.
The President saw it, too. “What is it, Ty?”
He ignored the President to focus on Steele. “Do you have a gun?”
Steele had replaced her beloved Glock with a Smith & Wesson M&P9. It held the same number of rounds and was a similar weapon, but she was still getting used to the feel of it and had set it down in a corner of the office, in its holster. Now her eyes glanced towards it, darted back to Ty and . . .
She knew. “Oh, God, Ty. Oh God, no . . .”
“I died.”
Steele saw the yearning in his face, the way his mouth hung open slightly when he wasn’t speaking, and she walked quickly over to where her gun rested. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the President rise slowly, backing away . . . although there was nowhere to go. If Ty should spring quickly . . .
Sliding the M&P9 free of its holster, she levelled it on Ty. He looked at her with boundless despair. “I think I know why: the virus is different with the intelligent ones. A whole other strain.”
The President gasped. “Oh my God. If that’s true . . .”
“The antiserum is useless now,” Ty said.
“No.” Steele blurted the word out without meaning to – her mind rebelled at the possibility that they’d made a crucial mistake and had actually failed when they thought they’d succeeded. “No, the antiserum still works on the old strain. We just have to contain the other version . . .”
She broke off as they all realized what that meant. Shooting Ty made the most sense.
“That’s why you have to kill me, Steele.”
“No, Ty, you’re still you. You’ve still got your reason—”
“You want to know what I’ve got, Steele? Hunger.” Ty’s dead eyes blazed now, and he took a half-step towards Steele. “There’s only one thing I want right now, and that’s to do whatever it takes to make that hunger stop. I want to eat you, Steele. I want to tear parts of you off with my teeth, swallow them, feel y
our blood in my mouth, running down my throat . . .”
“Don’t come any closer, Ty.” Steele pushed her thumb against the M&P’s safety.
The President said, softly, “He’s right, Steele. You have to do it. Or I will.”
Steele thought back to when she and the President had first met, when the President had taken a rifle that Steele couldn’t use and finished a task that should have been Steele’s. She’d been grateful then . . . but she couldn’t allow that to happen twice, not if she wanted to finish the rest of her own life with any grain of self-respect.
“Do it,” Ty said. “Before I can’t . . . before I can’t . . . stop it . . .” A thread of saliva slid down Ty’s chin.
Steele fired.
Bulletin from WhiteHouse.gov
Effective immediately, Sandra Steele, formerly Director of the Secret Service and Special Advisor to the President, has been named to serve as Vice President, replacing Bob Delancy, who succumbed to HRV earlier this year.
Vice President Steele is taking office just as the President and her administration return to occupancy in the White House, after regaining control from the New Zombie Order leader James Moreby. Moreby is currently being held captive in an unspecified location.
“I’m honored to accept this position and look forward to moving America into a revitalized future,” said Vice President Steele. “The President and I have worked together for some time, and we believe we can not only re-establish this nation’s greatness, but set it moving on some exciting new paths. We’ll be focusing first on making sure our citizens are safe, fed, housed, and receiving proper medical care; then we’ll turn our attention to the economy, our international relations, and our environment.”
(Biography of Steele attached)
Chapter Fifty-Three
KEVIN WAS STARTING to worry that he’d never fit in on Capitol Hill.
Since Steele’s promotion, he’d seen little of her and the President. His job put him in contact throughout the day with senators, representatives, lobbyists, aides, secretaries, under-secretaries, and a variety of other political animals . . . and he’d realized quite soon that he liked almost none of these people. Perhaps it was because he’d trekked across an America ripped open and consumed by death; maybe he’d seen the face of a brutality they wouldn’t even admit existed.
Whatever the reason, he found himself disgusted by the amount of deception and self-aggrandizement he was surrounded by. He wanted to stand in the middle of the Senate floor and scream, “Don’t you idiots get it? That world is gone.” Because they tried to pretend things were the same; in their little sealed enclave, the old battles were still being fought while the greater war went almost unacknowledged.
He would have already left if it hadn’t been for Maxi. He knew the boy didn’t much like it here, either, but there were people helping to care for him, and they were safer here than they would have been anywhere else. Kevin had come to rely on Maxi in ways that surprised him; returning home at the end of another frustrating day to find Maxi waiting for him, with a game or a DVD, kept him going.
It was 4:00 pm, and Kevin was just returning from another pointless meeting with several representatives who wondered why his department – the Government Accounting Office – wasn’t doing more about the deficit. Until the perimeter could be expanded to include more of Washington, most of the politicians worked now from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Kevin was negotiating one of its long, marble-tiled hallways when he heard his name called. He turned to see a man just exiting one of the offices and waving him back. It took a minute for him to remember: Senator Davis Tilich was the big, red-faced Texan who chaired the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
“Mr Moon,” Tilich said as Kevin approached, “I’ve been familiarizing myself with your files. Do I understand correctly that you possess a natural immunity to HRV?”
Kevin answered, “Yes, sir.”
“And it was your blood that was used to create the antiserum?”
“Initially, yes.”
The Senator’s eyes crinkled slightly beneath his white brows, his mottled red flesh turned into a mask of disapproval. “One thing that wasn’t clear in your files: Mr Moon, are you a homosexual?”
Everything in Kevin turned to ice, ice that was impossibly superheated. “Yes,” was all he managed.
Senator Tilich said, “I thought there was a reason the antiserum didn’t work. Good day to you, Mr Moon.” He turned and strode off.
Several seconds passed before the red cleared from Kevin’s vision, before he could force his legs to walk in a direction that didn’t involve following Tilich and driving a fist into his florid jowls. Before he knew it, Kevin was back in his office, where Maxi waited. As Kevin entered, Maxi was on his phone, but when he saw Kevin he said, “I’ll call you back,” and hung up.
“Are you okay?”
Kevin saw the look on the boy’s face, and it quenched the flames that had nearly engulfed him. “Yeah, I’m sorry, just . . . a rough day.” He threw himself on to the office couch, loosening his tie. After a few seconds, Maxi sat beside him. “Maybe . . . we shouldn’t stay here.”
Frowning, Kevin looked at Maxi. “What?”
“I was just talking to Maribel, and . . . everything’s different out there. She’s different. She says she no longer feels like something is directing her, making her do stuff she doesn’t want to do. She still gets . . . you know . . . hungry, but she says she can control it.” After a few seconds, Maxi looked away and added, “I want to go see her.”
Kevin sat up straighter and said, “You know it’s still not safe out there, no matter what Maribel says. Right now we’re winning, but—”
Maxi cut him off. “We’re not winning. Not really. There are too many of them. They’re already coming for this place again. I can hear them outside the fences.”
Everyone could hear them. And yet most of those living here ignored the moans and the scrabblings, the gunshots that took one down so four more could take their place. They all heard the sounds and pushed them away into a corner, behind their petty concerns and useless meetings.
“You’re right,” Kevin said. “It’s already dead here.”
Kevin could get a car. He probably wouldn’t be able to put together many supplies, so they’d have to forage along the way. It would be dangerous, but they’d be moving, and they’d be together, and they’d have a goal.
“Pack whatever you need,” Kevin said.
Maxi grinned, and rushed off. Kevin felt a weight slide from him. He briefly considered calling Steele – to thank her, to say goodbye and good luck – but decided not to. He didn’t want to risk anyone stopping them.
A few minutes later, Kevin and Maxi walked out of the Eisenhower building, each carrying a few precious items. It was already late in the day, but they wouldn’t stay here one more night. Not in this land of the trapped, home of the failed.
Life was waiting.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Duncan Proudfoot (as always), Nicola Chalton and Pascal Thivillon (without whom . . .), Max Burnell, Joe Roberts, Michael Marshall Smith, Pat Cadigan, Peter Crowther, Christopher Fowler and John Llewellyn Probert. Special thanks, of course, to Lisa Morton for ensuring that this novel will never be favourably reviewed on Fox News Channel. Dedicated with grateful thanks to the memory of Nick Robinson. —SJ
My thanks go to Stephen Jones, who I now officially owe twenty years’ worth of gratitude to. —LM
Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, award-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening”. Her most recent books include the novels Netherworld: Book One of the Chronicles of Diana Furnaval and Malediction, and the Bram Stoker Award-winning Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. She lives in North Hollywood, California, and can be found online at lisamorton.com.
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