“How do you—”
“Don't ask, kid. All you need to know is why I'm wearing this.”
“Um, because you started the Zombie Apocalypse?” Victoria said with an intentional uptalk.
“Ah, you sound like my daughter,” she motioned to Debbie, “when she plays her part.”
Liam let go of the girl's hand. She fell to the metal surface, but he made sure it wasn't far enough to hurt her.
“Your daughter? She mentioned her mother was coming,” Liam spoke while he took a step away from Debbie.
“Wouldn't you? She's the only good thing left in my world. She was finally going to have a new father...”
He became distracted by his thoughts. Internally, he tried to visualize how he could use Debbie as leverage to free himself and the people on the boat. If he had a gun, he might be able to do it, but with drones watching his every move that didn't seem likely. He wasn't even sure what he'd say.
“Guess again,” she shouted. “Why am I wearing this suit?” Liam could barely hear her now that she'd moved backward, but her motions were clear. She was waving someone up from inside the cabin of her racing boat.
“Mom!”
His heart passed on several beats.
Elsa guided Lana up onto the deck of her boat, then indicated she should stand there. She looked tired and bruised—her hair had been shaved from a chunk of the left side of her head. What was left on that side barely reached her ear.
“Don't you move,” Elsa said to him. Victoria had also taken a few steps forward. “I have another surprise,” she said with a cackle.
The next person to come out of the cabin made Liam's blood flow backward.
“Dad?”
2
The shock of seeing his dad lasted only long enough for his heart to restart. He ran the final few yards to the edge of the barge and threatened to jump onto the flat top-deck of the cigarette boat. His mom was zip-tied and had a gag in her mouth. Her eyes were sad—focused on him.
His dad—
“Liam Peters. I'm pleased to re-acquaint you with your late father. I had some trouble finding him. He was buried, don't ya know?” Her laugh was malicious.
His dad was a zombie. The creature—he willed himself to see it as something other than the man who was once his father—was attached to a loop at the end of a metal bar held by another man dressed in the funky skin. The zombie stumbled as the man pushed him onto the deck. It saw Lana and tried to lean toward her, though the man kept it in check.
“What are you doing?” he shouted. “You dug up my dad?” he said with a frantic voice.
Victoria held firm to his arm, but she emitted a shriek, like she was fighting back the horror.
“Liam, there's something you should know about me. I'm a "just do it" girl. I never quit. I never roll over. I never lose my focus. Once you killed my lover, the gloves came off.”
He'd been there when her fiancé died, but he didn't kill him. A point she probably already knew, since she'd watched it with drones.
“I've followed you. Your family. Your friends. I've been trying to get you all in one place, so I could have the pleasure of killing them all in front of your Grandma, but I've got to hand it to you people. You are hard to catch. Those three black girls you had with you in the mine? Where did they go?”
He stood, stone-faced, while looking at his parents. Even if he knew where the strange girls had gone, he'd resist telling her.
“It doesn't matter. You left some people in your MRAP—Hayes' MRAP—down in Busch Stadium. Didn't you? I figured it was abandoned, but my intel says no one went in before it magically drove away after you were gone. That means someone was still inside.”
Mel and Phil are alive?
“You've been very lucky. Too lucky, I'd say. Is your Grandma pulling your strings?” she said matter-of-factly. “I wonder.”
Unwilling to give her the pleasure of seeing his anger, he kept still.
“I don't care,” she spoke with venom. “Rose is still AWOL, though we traced her call to you. We'll find her. For now, I'll settle for them,” she said as she pointed at Mom and Dad. “The two people you care about more than anyone else in the world. Plus, Victoria and Marty,” she chuffed. “I've got you here,” she pointed to Victoria, “and Marty is with my sleeper agent. She should be here soon enough to see the fireworks.”
Grandma's alive, too?
It became hard to hold back. He wanted to yell and scream and rescue Mom, but he didn't know how that could happen. And if Grandma was around…
He stood there. Emotionless on the surface.
Jerry thrashed against his brace, causing Lana to side-step.
“Don't fight him, yet,” Elsa said to Lana, without bothering to look at her.
Lana's eyes re-focused on Liam.
Elsa pointed at Mom. “I found her with no problem. She followed you to Forest Park. In a tank!” she giggled. “Yeah, funniest thing. She used that old tank to cross the dead land between the St. Louis Arch and Forest Park—looking for you. I found her gawking at the home you blew up, Liam. It was a simple matter of intercepting her, separating her from her Polar Bear pals, and stuffing her into this speedboat with her late husband. It's been a real interesting ride, let me tell you.”
Liam felt heartbroken for his mom. She had started crying, though she fought it.
His mind was afire with ten different feelings. He'd been betrayed. Friends were still alive, he thought were dead. Grandma was alive. Line after line scrolled through his train of thought until he reached the final one.
“It can't end like this,” he whispered to Victoria.
There had to be a way he could save them all. Had to be.
Throughout much of his journey, he'd felt like he had a guardian angel watching over him. Someone there to pull the trigger to remove threats at just the right time. That angel had used an entire towboat and its barges to run down Duchesne back in St. Louis. That piece of “good luck” actually started the whole process which brought them all to this moment. Maybe it would have been better if they'd perished there. Now, more people were going to die.
Because of him.
“Liam, we have to do something. Fast,” Victoria said out of the side of her mouth. They couldn't be heard by Elsa because of the distance between them, but she seemed to understand their motives.
She cut the tether on his dad.
“God. No. Please.”
3
The zombie that was formerly his dad used his newfound freedom to lunge at the person facing him. Liam found it strange to think first of how his mom's neck had been cleared of all distractions—her shaved hair suddenly made perfect sense. It was the exact spot where the zombie attacked.
The Quantum Virus was about to claim another victim.
He pulled out the knife given to him by Brandyweis. It was a huge military knife with one sharp serrated edge. He judged it to be similar to a Bowie knife, which was one of the weapons in World of Undead Soldiers. Not a very good one, he noted. It could be thrown in the game—something he'd never done before.
Lana, knowing she was doomed, let herself fall backward. The additional weight of the Dad-zombie propelled them across and down the slick, rounded surface of the motorboat.
As they moved, he threw the knife as hard as he could at his father. He used all the hatred he had for Elsa and what she'd done by digging him up and putting him in front of his mom. It sank into his dad's side, but there was no question it would serve no role in stopping him. The knife's only function was to make him feel that he'd tried.
Lana fell into the water with the zombie, beyond his sight.
She didn't want me to see her die.
“You bitch!” Liam screamed as he tried to lunge at her. Victoria held his arm, which he both fought and relished. The man behind Elsa had a gun trained on him.
Elsa tapped her side, and the gray guard dog lurched so it sat between them as well.
“No more weapons! We're not done,” she s
aid with finality.
Liam was burning with anger—and despair, but as with so many encounters of late, he felt helpless in equal measure. Maybe he could have reached her and pushed her into the water, but then the drone would kill Victoria and everyone else. And he couldn't be sure he'd best the woman in the water.
She held up her wrist and spoke into it. “Janey Fitzhume-Hayes, come on down,” she added a laugh before dropping her arm.
“I know she's not a friend of yours, but I figure killing her will pass the time for us until my consolation prize arrives. Once Marty is here, we can wrap this up and I can get back to the responsibilities of seeking the real prize: Rose Peters.”
“Why? Why are you doing this? None of this makes any sense. What do my grandmas have to do with the world?” he replied with embers of anger flaming high.
The drone moved so they could talk, though the man's gun remained pointed at him.
Elsa looked at her wrist like she was checking the time. “I've got time to kill. Why not.”
She moved to the edge of her boat. Close enough to talk normally.
“The world was doomed, kid. The Spanish Flu was the key. That's how we found the Quantum Virus. Looking at preserved samples, we were able to extrapolate its structure down to the sub-atomic level. A smart immunologist whom you know noticed the base composition had changed over the course of the few years we had good enough microscopes to get down to that level. He deduced the virus embeds itself in a host and needs about a hundred years before it activates. Because our, um, helper virus used the code from the Spanish Flu strain of Influenza, and because that had been building itself for those hundred years, it became much more virulent than we ever imagined. Ironically, those with the most immunity were the people alive during the time of the original epidemic in 1918, although some elderly people also had limited immunity from spending so much time with their older immune family members.”
She laughed, though not as heartily as before.
“Once we started, we had to ride the bucking bronco all the way to the end. We're managing this crisis so that when the Quantum Virus runs its course, we'll be there to pick up the pieces.”
“But you released the virus to kill citizens. Why are you after my family!”
“Settle. Settle,” she said calmly. “If you want to reshape the world as an ideal image, you have to ensure you're the one controlling all the clay. There was too much deadweight in our government. Too many payments to keep people quiet. To keep them in line. Do you know my group has been paying off politicians since the Founding Fathers' time?”
Liam's head wobbled with the foreign-sounding history lesson. As far as he could tell, it had nothing to do with his mom and dad's deaths, or his grandma's.
She sighed tightly. “What I mean, my young Mr. Peters is that it became too expensive to control the world. We're using this as an opportunity to scale back our financial obligations—our bribes if you will—and start over with a smaller, but more powerful, cadre of politicos.”
His blank looks were working.
“Dammit. Don't you see? In order to control a politician, you have to own him. When my predecessors started this game back in the early 1800's, money was plentiful and politicians were few. Today, it's the opposite. Those same families have controlled the levers of power for too long. They've become complacent, even in their bathtubs of money. We're going to start over with fewer politicians.”
“And fewer people,” Victoria spoke with great sadness.
“Yes, the Quantum Virus was unexpected, as I said. But, since I'm now the head of Homeland Security, I'm in line for the Presidency. Lots of room out here for the few left in the line of succession to find themselves in accidents. I'll just have to renounce my dual citizenship to Iceland, without worrying about those pesky Constitutionalists griping about not being natural born,” she chuckled. “And once I'm President of the United States, none of this will matter. If there are only a handful of people left, we can rebuild the whole world.”
“You are beyond insane,” he finally said.
“Don't use that word!” she shouted, sounding exactly like an insane person. “The United States was an engine that drove the world with money. My peers and I shaped the world using that money. We told politicians what to think. We told them when to fight wars. When to sell. When to buy. And we were very good at it. We took the United States to the pinnacle of civilization.”
He put his hands on his ears. The words drove him mad. It couldn't be something so base as money. Zombies were not created as a debt-eraser for a group of rich people. His mom and dad didn't die for greenbacks.
“So, what, you're like the Illuminati, or whatever? I've seen the movie,” Victoria's voice passed through his hands because she was so close. He loosened them so he could hear the reply.
“We have many names. If anyone hints at revealing our true name, they and their entire family are murdered outright. Sometimes we set nations at war to exterminate those families.”
“Like saying National Internal Security,” he challenged while dropping his hands.
“The NIS is one of our fronts, yes. And you will die for saying the name. Mark my words.”
Her calm demeanor frightened him to the bone. Here was someone willing to kill the people he loved right in front of him, but also kill the entire world around all of them. There was no limit to the level of…
“You're evil,” he said flatly.
“What? You think I'm 'he who must not be named?'” she said dramatically. “Hey, what about this? Have you heard the initials RF?”
He looked at Victoria and saw no recognition.
“Aww, damn. You must not read horror books.”
He took serious issue with the statement but didn't care what she thought about his depth of literary knowledge, positive he'd read many more zombie books than her. Her frustration at not being able to goad him was seemingly tiring her to their conversation.
“Anyway,” she said, “I'm not the devil if that's what you're thinking. God doesn't exist.” She pointed to Victoria's cross on her necklace. “And praying will get you nothing but disappointment.”
“But you are the devil,” Liam replied. “And the only way ultimate evil can exist is if ultimate good is out there, too. If the world were controlled by evil, it would always look like this.” He pointed out into the broken world as he said it. “God may not be a person, but God works through good people. I've seen it. And I know a group of evil men and women like you could not have run the world for so long and not messed it up sooner.”
“Actually, Liam, they did.”
Jane had come up and joined them from the hold.
4
“Tell them I'm not crazy, Jane.”
“Oh, you are. But that doesn't mean you're a liar.” She turned to Liam and Victoria as she came up next to them. “Douglas and I were deep in their ranks before all this happened. I saw firsthand how they could nudge legislation, or pay off a foreign country to keep oil prices low. I've seen how they contract hits on people and prune back family trees. But the thing that turned us off—made us risk death day after day—was their relish for the chaos. I'd been brought up my whole life thinking we were doing a necessary duty to the world—pushing it in the right direction. But the reality was just the opposite. The world was being ruined by what we'd become. The final straw was this virus. We could have easily put out a warning that saved a lot of lives. Instead, we let the world get bitten. Some of us even enjoyed the result.”
Jane spoke up. “You killed Douglas, didn't you?”
“I picked him up at your family business, where you dropped him off. He's floating somewhere close I'd expect,” she said with a girlish giggle.
Liam expected her to cry or show some kind of emotional distress, but she seemed outwardly serene. She swiped at her brow, then dropped her forearm to her mouth so it blocked it from Elsa's view.
“Good luck,” she said in a low voice. She said something else, in a whisper,
which sounded like “I love you Clara,” but it made no sense.
Before Liam could reply she'd reached behind her and pulled out a boxy-looking pistol. The sound was deafening as she fired multiple times at Elsa.
Elsa dodged the first volley and slid across the deck back into the driver's compartment of her boat, along with the man. He watched her skin-tight uniform as she dove. Jane tried to follow, but the gray drone intercepted her.
He and Victoria both dropped to the deck at the moment the confrontation started, but the women were so fast he was able to watch nearly the whole thing before he thought to get himself flat.
The drone was about thirty feet away, to their right. When she was about halfway to the boat, it oriented on her and unleashed hell. Its twin guns lit up even as Jane tried to knock it out of the sky.
More guns cracked behind them. The Secret Service agents fired their rifles at the drone while poking out the top of the stairs.
Just as it looked like she might survive the open-air crossing, Jane fell heavily to the metal. The gun skittered across the deck, into the water. Blood saturated the back of her shirt as she lay face-down. Where moments before she was vivacious and energetic in her efforts to kill Elsa, now she was wide-eyed and dead.
The drone swung its guns toward the Secret Service agents, firing all the while. But Jane had scored at least one hit. One of its blades was noticeably erratic, and the whole unit tipped as the other three fans compensated. The guns were also firing wild, which gave him no reassurance as he kept low. To his surprise he was on top of Debbie, ensuring she wouldn't be struck by a bullet.
The one time I don't want to be the hero.
But that wasn't necessarily true. He'd protect anyone…
Except, maybe, her.
Once Elsa was out of sight, he was able to eye the drone as it took more damage from Ben and his partner.
The problem was the remaining drones. Even as they beat the junkyard dog into submission—knocking out a second fan motor—the surviving drones closed the distance with the agents. A volley of gunfire sent the two men back down into the hold.
Since The Sirens Box Set | Books 1-7 Page 172