Since The Sirens Box Set | Books 1-7

by Isherwood, E. E.

  She was gone in moments.

  In the video, McMurphy slumped in his chair. He picked up the same photo he would later give to Liam. He held it as long as he could until one of his helpers walked in.

  The video ended.

  3

  Liam's finger hovered over the button to start the next video. “So we know Jane was over the colonel, but this doesn't really tell us anything new, right?”

  “Not that I can see. Let's check out the next one.”

  The colonel began with another introduction video. He was at his desk. “I'm not proud of this next one. I acted like a teenaged boy, but it's important I show the world what we're dealing with.”

  The intro ended and Liam clicked the next one. Instead of a view from the corner of the tent, this one was obviously a hidden camera. It looked like it was a view from the front of the colonel's face. Liam could imagine a camera on the rim of his cap, or possibly on a pair of glasses. The scene re-focused as he changed directions with his head. It opened with him walking behind Jane inside the Riverside Hotel. Liam and Victoria both knew the place as a dark stinky place full of zombies, but in the video, it was bright and fresh.

  “Welcome to my secret lair, colonel. Moo ha ha.”

  Spencer was laughing hysterically and pretending to pet an imaginary cat. She wore another white blouse, and with the improved camera quality, Liam could see it was wildly inappropriate and revealing. She also wore a tight pair of khaki shorts.

  Victoria had no comment on her obvious flaunting of her...assets...in front of the colonel.

  “Oh, lighten up. I'm just having some fun.”

  “With all due respect, there's nothing fun about this virus.”

  Spencer switched gears in one fluid motion.

  “Shall we get right to it?” Her alternating demeanor was unsettling. Taken with her dress code, Liam wondered if she was trying to keep the older man off balance.

  She began walking across the large open room. Liam recognized it as the top level of the hotel.

  “Colonel, what do you know so far about the virus?”

  The colonel had to talk to her back as they both walked.

  “I'm afraid we know very little. My camp has had a few potential infected, but they all turned out to be carrying the actual flu, influenza. I've not seen the Doomsday Bug. Not sure I would know it if I saw it.”

  “Yuck, I hate that name. It should have been named something cool like Terminator Flu or The Fifth Horseman. Something Apocalypse-y. Don't you think?”

  He said nothing.

  “But OK, whatever. I'll show you the virus. Stay with me through here.” Spencer had crossed the room and plunged down another stairwell. It was very dark. She was just a shadow in the video. Liam's eyes had yet to adjust to the switch from daylight to this. He had just about adjusted to total darkness—

  Without warning, the colonel ran into something. The camera rattled and flickered.

  “Oh, sorry ma'am!”

  He had run right into her backside.

  “Mmm hmm. The lights in this stairwell aren't working. This is our floor.”

  He followed as she went out into the well-lit floor, the camera struggling to adapt to the changing brightness. The colonel's camera observed everything on each side, as if he were trying to avoid looking at the woman ahead of him. Other men and women in military uniforms walked around on this level, though none were close. They were on a circular walkway looking out over the wide open interior of the tubular hotel. Again, Liam had recently been in that exact place, though he didn't know what floor they were on.

  “My team has been busy in several parts of the world, doing research on this thing. Trying to get clues on its origin. How we might contain it. So far, zip.”

  She walked along the inside railing, dragging her hand on the metalwork, giving the colonel the opportunity to look over the side with his hidden camera. More workers were on other floors, moving here and there. On a floor very near the bottom, the video showed someone in a neck collar with a long pole attached behind them, being pushed along by two helpers. The person was covered head-to-toe in some kind of mesh wrap. Hard to say for sure from so high up, and the video was unable to clearly identify the situation beyond that.

  “What are they doing down there with that man?” He pointed down. She looked over the side as she walked, and answered in a distracted fashion.

  “Ohhh, they're probably bringing in another flu victim. Finding a room.”

  “Ma'am, are all these rooms filled with the sick? Are we safe here?”

  She giggled slightly as she replied, “Don't be ridiculous. Even we don't have the resources to fly in that many sick people from across the globe. No, we put a score of the newest victims down on the lower levels. Up here, we keep a few special cases, like the one I'm about to show you.”

  He tried to stifle his own laugh, but couldn't prevent it from coming out.

  At that, Spencer stopped and turned around. She looked right into the camera.

  “You think what we're doing here is funny?”

  Struggling to regain himself, he replied, “No, ma'am. It's just that if you were bringing these sick people here—well, you've got them in the middle of the city. Surely you see the huge risk you're taking? This is the plot of a bad horror movie. Why aren't you sending them to my camp out in the country where their ability to escape and do harm is minimized? I have a ten-foot fence around the entire place and soldiers prepared to defend it.”

  “You military men are all the same. Always thinking about the fight. Do you have any idea how many bombs have been dropped overseas trying to squelch outbreaks? How many tanks have ground the infected to paste to reduce the spread? Satellites. Aircraft carriers. Stealth bombers. All manner of killing. And do you know how much that military thinking has helped the cause of mankind?”

  “Right here.” She held up her hand, making the symbol of zero. “Squat. Sure, maybe it bought you and me some time to prepare our Last Will and Testaments, but the reality is no one will be around to read them. And do you know why, Colonel? Can you think beyond the bullet?”

  She took a step back.

  “Camps. Cordons. Cities. It won't matter. But maybe I'm being unfair. You don't know what humanity is dealing with. Well, I'm not gonna tell you. I'm going to show you. This isn't patient zero—we've had no luck finding that prize—but this might be patient 100 or 1000. Close enough to the beginning to expose the flaw in your mindset.”

  She pulled out a key card and moved to a nearby door. The colonel and his camera followed.

  “Get yourself together, old man. What I'm about to show you is going to cause you to soil your pants. I hate to be so blunt, but you'll have to prove me wrong.”

  Liam was on the edge of the seat to see what was inside, but the colonel's camera drifted with Jane as she opened the door and walked with it.

  He's checking her out.

  Liam struggled to understand why the colonel would be drawn so obviously to the attractive woman—knowing he had a wife and son—but he remembered the girl in the nightgown in the rail yard as well as the strange attraction some of the zombies had on Victoria on floor twenty. Perhaps the colonel was similarly affected.

  As the door opened, she drifted with it.

  “This is where the infection will take humanity.”

  When she was concealed by the heavy and very open door, the colonel seemed to be released from her spell and he turned to focus on the big revelation.

  He looked into the wrecked room, and saw the plague victim standing inside the darkened space.

  “Oh my God in Heaven.”

  4

  Liam didn't know what he was looking at. It was obvious to him it was a zombie, but it was unlike any he'd seen since the sirens. He wore a military uniform of some kind, but it had been muddied and bloodied, making it impossible for Liam to identify. The thing's skin was plastered to its bones, as if it had no muscle mass. The skin, where visible, was black.

 
; “The eyes,” the colonel whispered.

  Off camera, the voice of Jane answered. “Yes, the eyes are haunting, huh? We haven't quite figured them out, but we know they can sense living humans, even in their...condition.”

  Liam could stare because the colonel was staring. The zombie had no eyes in his sockets, but he—it—seemed to look directly at the camera. His arms and legs were bound in heavy chains to a large metal box behind him. The beds had been removed from the room.

  “Where...where did you find this one?”

  “Funny you should ask. This is a local—found him down in a quarry of all places. We call him Twelve.” Liam hoped the colonel would ask about the name, but...

  “This man looks—”

  “Dead? Yeah. The infected like him are pretty much dead.”

  “So, my camps have to prepare. How do I cure this?” He shook his head in the video. “No. This has to be some kind of mistake. A prank. Right?”

  Liam appreciated that Jane had seemed to keep him off guard whenever they interacted, and she did seem to have a twisted sense of humor. Maybe this was an elaborate prank. Some kind of initiation for the grisly business they'd soon be doing.

  “Can I have your sidearm?”

  The camera turned to her, then with a series of shakes, it displayed a man's hand holding a large pistol.

  “I'm afraid it isn't very modern. I've had this 1911 since I entered the service.”

  “Oh yeah? When was that? No, I don't care.”

  A series of loud bangs resonated in the camera's audio, though they came across as impotent pops on the tinny speakers of the laptop. She was shooting the zombie in the chest. Liam didn't count how many rounds she'd fired, but in moments, the camera panned from the zombie's chest to her outstretched arm with the quiet gun, then back to the zombie. Either she'd run out of ammo, or had proven her point.

  “You still think this is a prank?” she yelled.

  Liam knew both their ears would be ringing.

  “Lord help me, I don't. What is that?”

  “It doesn't scare you?”

  He seemed to consider. “I, uh...”

  “Let me put this another way. Do you think I should have sent this to your happy little village, now that you've seen it?”

  Liam was impressed. The colonel had no response to her relentless attack.

  After a few moments, Jane began talking in an almost-normal voice.

  “Colonel, I showed this to you, but I want you to know there is almost no one on this continent that knows what you now know. Can you imagine if this got out?” She'd said it in a funny way, as if she was goading the old man.

  At last, he seemed to regain his composure. But as before, the colonel only went for the questions of consequence. “Why are you showing me this, Ms. Spencer? This isn't about camps or cures, is it?”

  She laughed. “You want to know something funny? You had it exactly right. The cure to these things is bombs and grinding under tank treads with extreme malice. The rest of your Army is doing that overseas. Giving you, me, and other scientists the time we need to prepare our country for what's ahead. I brought you here, Colonel McMurphy, because I need to know I can trust you. It's going to take men of your caliber to bring us through this plague and I don't have time to run an extensive profile on you. If I felt you were someone I couldn't trust, I might have just shoved you in the room with Twelve here.”

  The colonel's camera panned to her face. It was deadly serious, but at the extreme end of an awkward silence, she cracked a smile.

  “I'm joking, of course! Health and Human Services would revoke my parking pass if I did that. I mainly wanted to see if you would freak out on me.” She turned serious. “Sir, if there's one thing we need, it's people who can follow orders without freaking out. When these things show up in your camp, you are going to need a steady hand at the helm. I need a steady hand out there. Can I count on you?”

  The camera turned back to the zombie in the tattered uniform. When he began speaking, he did not look back at Jane.

  “Yes, you can count on me, ma'am.”

  The video stopped.

  Liam set the laptop a bit off to his side, and turned to Victoria. “So the colonel knew about this all along. He knew there were these dead—things—out there, but he never showed one to me. He never even mentioned it. He seemed to be focused on...”

  He looked out into the yard. It was vibrant green. Alive.

  “The colonel stayed focused on curing the other disease. Hayes and Duchesne said there were three viruses out there. This dead, whatever it is, creature is not the same as the zombies we've been seeing all over St. Louis. Or Chicago. Or anywhere.”

  He recalled the Riverside Hotel had each floor labeled to signify which city the zombies had come from. Hayes said they were different depending on where they found them. But which floor had this particular zombie been on?

  “He said something about the regular old flu being the first virus. Then a modified flu virus was the second virus. And finally, the third virus was more like Ebola. But what virus can bring the dead back to life?”

  He laughed, going back to his books on zombies. Just when he thought he'd come to terms with the presence of blood-sucking zombies, he was faced with the textbook definition of a zombie. Now, even after seeing it with his own eyes, he had difficulty accepting such a creature existed.

  A small window popped up on the screen, asking him to confirm the update of some piece of software. He tapped the no button, then returned to the window containing the videos.

  He clicked the next one.

  5

  It was another introductory video, back in the colonel's tent.

  It began with a long pause. He sat at his desk turned away from the camera. Liam couldn't tell for sure, but he believed he was looking at the photograph of his wife and son.

  “This next video is what this is all about. Ms. Spencer probably didn't know that I'd figured out where that soldier had come from. She said she trusted me, but I'm sure she didn't fully trust me if she didn't give me the courtesy of telling me the origin of a man who had so obviously been found near a military cemetery. But she'd given me enough. He was U.S. Army, but his uniform was from World War II.”

  In the video, he turned to the camera as he swiveled his chair.

  “Susan, I hope this video reaches you. I think you are the only person who would believe I'm not pulling an elaborate hoax when you see this. I need someone to know about this, or I'll go insane. I'm going to do everything I can to send all these videos to you, and you can decide who needs to see them. You have these videos, the Mile 444 files, and all the research on the more recent infected I could put on this datachip.”

  The video flicked off.

  “Liam, is he talking about the same quarry?”

  “Yes, there are one too many coincidences about that quarry. And it's next door to the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery. That's the exact kind of place where one might find a soldier dressed in World War II garb. Though I have no idea why he would have been found in the quarry.”

  “Well then, that's where we need to go. This proves it. Those people were doing something down there. We just need to find out what.” She seemed chipper.

  “You seem to be enjoying this. Did you see the same video I did?” He laughed, but it was insincere.

  “Oh yeah, zombies, zombies, and...oh yeah, zombies. So what's new? Look, Hayes and Jane and whoever else they work for are obviously up to no good. You said it yourself. We can either stay back here safe and snug until the zombies come for us, or we can throw ourselves into the impossible task of going out there to take the fight to them. They already shot me once. I've got eight lives to go.”

  I still don't think we watched the same video.

  Her enthusiasm took the edge off what he'd witnessed. She had a knack for that.

  “OK then, let's see what we're in for...”

  But the screen was frozen.

  He tried to push the mouse
around with the tiny touch pad, but the computer had locked up. Over the years, he'd probably seen ten thousand computer lock ups. He pressed the power, waited several seconds, then pressed it again so it would restart.

  “You're right. I am anxious to get out there and figure this out. The colonel was frightened by the sight of the zombie, but other than being way uglier than the zombies we've been dealing with, it didn't look any worse.”

  He bumped her with his shoulder as the computer beeped during reboot.

  “I have to admit, I'm so glad we met. I'm so glad you stuck with me throughout all those weeks of running around and confusion. I wouldn't want to go back out there without you.”

  He looked at her face, longing for another excuse to kiss her, but the computer was back on the desktop, waiting for him to do something. He almost found the willpower to turn away from her, but she grabbed him.

  “Liam, I'm not blind to the danger. Deep down I'm scared to death of what I saw on that movie, and what's out there. Zombies. The dead. People like Duchesne and Hayes and the NIS. But I'm more scared of sitting here and dying with this whole happy town. I'm scared of being told to dig in the mud until the guns run out of ammo. I'm scared of starving to death. I'm scared of pretty much everything.”

  She touched his elbow with her fingertips.

  “So don't take my willingness to seek out danger as recklessness or, God forbid, a suicidal streak. I'm glad too, that I have you with me. We aren't quitters.”

  He turned back to the screen, biting his tongue as he felt himself get emotional.

  She's willing to follow me into the circles of Hell.

  He imagined the spiral road of the pit quarry as just that: Dante's nine circles. The rest of the world was the tenth circle...

  Finally, the computer was ready, as was he. He called up the file browser, and searched for the data chip once more. He was sure he'd gotten himself back, but was puzzled by what he saw on the screen.