“They poisoned us?”
Victoria noted he included himself in the victim group.
“I'm afraid so.” She hesitated, wondering if she should engage him. Then figured she had nothing to lose. “Look. Maybe your mom only said she injected this stuff. Maybe she fought back-”
“No. She used it. I saw her.” Russ's look was distant, but he held firm to the gun.
“OK. Don't panic. I have ... an immunity to the plague that can help you, too.”
The gun came up. “How stupid do I look? You come in ahead of the zampires, kill my mom, and poke around her medical fridge. I'm not believing anything you say.”
Like tipping over a cliff, she couldn't resist responding. “You call them zampires? I know someone who would love to know that.”
“Shut up,” he screamed.
She raised her hands, signaling her acceptance.
Tears welled in Russ's eyes. “Just shut it. I need to think.” He backed away a few steps, allowing Victoria to relax just a bit. Victoria couldn't imagine what must be going through his head.
“I'm infected?” Russ spoke quietly and sounded incredulous. “Mom did this to me?”
“She couldn't have known.”
“Shut up! I'm a zampire? I'm evil like Roger?” He appeared to freeze in deep thought.
Moments later, he shot a look to her like he'd figured something out. He put the stock of the shotgun on the floor and leaned over it.
“No thanks,” he said with hatred.
Victoria, seeing the setup, jumped to her feet and threw herself sideways toward him. The gun went off and the buckshot missed Russ's head and went up through the roof. A wild scream came back down.
A few seconds later, several guns opened new holes in the roof as she and Russ dove under the steel table. The clanks of shots hitting medical equipment and passing back and forth through the metal of the shed continued for an eternity.
The boy belatedly realized he wanted to die and he shuffled back out from under the table.
“Don't!” Victoria yelled over the furious noise. “Please. I need you.”
Russ stayed on the floor in the wide open but remained unhurt when the shots stopped completely. “Just kill me. I deserve it. Just kill me. I deserve it.”
His methodical chant was intended to convince her to do the deed, but it only made her mad. “Dammit, Russ. You lived through three weeks of Hell. I get it. Your mom is dead. I get it. She infected you. And others. I freaking get it!”
Her voice was strong and loud as her hearing came back.
“But you're alive. That makes you special. You can play a part in rebuilding this crummy world. I can't do that on my own. We need strong young men like you. All the girls here are strong survivors. You guys are what we need to fight back.”
Russ was curled up in a ball on the concrete floor, unwilling or unable to respond.
She sat next to him, ensuring the gun was at his feet-away from them both. The screams from above had gone away, though shadows moved across the numerous holes up there where the metal had been perforated. A part of her thought someone would see them or hear them and finish them off, but it was one worry among hundreds at that moment. The pounding of the infected had died back down. It was quiet enough for them to talk and be heard.
“My mother was a nurse, too. She worked at St. Joseph's Children's Hospital in Denver her whole life. She'd tell me stories about the horrible things she saw there, but she always backed them up by saying how much care was given to those patients and how most of them-through proper treatment and lots of love-survived and went on to live healthy lives. She told me the most important thing was to believe you were working for God, using the hands He'd lent us, to fix those too weak or sick to help themselves. She must have seen some awful stuff, but she always came home cheerful and upbeat. Every day. Since I've been old enough to notice.”
She turned to Russ, still crouched in a ball.
“She's why I wanted to go into medicine. I wanted to see if I had it in me to look into the face of sickness, desperation, and even death-and still have a smile on my face. I think I have my answer. Your mom helped me see it, too.”
Russ finally responded. “How?”
“This place. There are a million things your mom could have done to save herself or save you alone. She could have run for the hills, or swam down the river. Maybe you all could have hidden in this shed forever and not be bothered. But she chose to help the women who came to her in the best way she knew how. I might disagree with all my heart about whether it was right or wrong, but I don't think she did it because she hated these girls. She loved them. She loved you.”
There was no way to know what was in Margaret's heart, but it didn't matter. She was trying to convince Russ the fiction was true.
“And I'm sure she had no idea what was in these vials. FEMA probably told her it was protection from the plague, or maybe that it was the cure. I've heard a lot crazier things over the past three weeks. The government is tracking down 100-year-old women for experiments, there are Polar Bears running around St. Louis, and all of the East Coast is in a convoy heading this way. Crazy stuff, all of it.”
“Am I infected,” he said in a muffle.
“Who knows. Maybe these vials are all a placebo. This is some kind of control batch for a country-wide experiment. You have to understand there are a lot of things it could be. We just don't know.”
Russ cried softly, and this time when Victoria put her hand on him she wasn't rebuffed.
Take small steps. We'll get there.
Chapter 4. Propane accessories
Liam watched with a feeling of futility as the zombie men and women kept forcing their way through the collapsed garage door. Someone was still alive because gunfire continued over there, but it was losing steam fast.
The zombies below his window stood shoulder-to-shoulder as far as he could see in the orange haze of the dust cloud. He figured most of them would be trying to get the people in the outbuilding, but the nearest ones reached up and pined for him like spurned lovers.
“I don't see how we can get over there,” he said while cupping his chin in thought.
Sabella's daughter was stuck on the other side of that river of dead. He was more than willing to help with any rescue, but only after he knew Victoria was safe. It was past time to get downstairs and check on her.
He sighed.
“OK, the first things we need are some weapons.” He turned around to find Sabella and her daughters had left the room while he was lost in thought at the window.
“Hey, wait up,” he called, unsure if he should shout or remain quiet. There were at least two dead men on the upper floor, but there was no way to know if there were others. The thought of the pair of armed women downstairs encouraged him to stop at Wilder's body. The dead man had numerous cuts down his back as well as the final one on the side of his head.
Liam needed that knife, so he pulled it out of the bone. The vibration sickened him as it rubbed the man's skull on the way out. He wiped the blood from the blade using the ruined mattress. Almost as an afterthought, he grabbed the empty revolver from where it had fallen near the bed. Finally, he stood up, jumped over the man's legs, and went out the door.
There were four bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor, along with a large utility closet at the end of the hall. The door hung open and the girls stood around putting on clothes. Sabella looked at him with concern, and once he understood what they were doing, he turned his back on them.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“It's all right, Sam,” Sabella said in a kind voice. “I know you aren't the kind of person who would make us wear these.”
He glanced back to her briefly. She held up the horrible dress she'd been forced to wear and showed him the word SLAVE again.
“He enjoyed watching us suffer both mentally and physically,” she spit out. “This was his idea of sticking it to us, but we're no one's slaves.”
“How l
ong have you been here?” he asked to try to change the subject.
The mother and her girls continued to get dressed and Liam didn't get his answer. He figured it was none of his business, so he reoriented on the nearby stairwell to listen for Victoria. The noise of the horde outside was as constant as a Spring downpour, making it hard to hear anything else. If anyone inside the house was talking below, he couldn't hear them.
“I have to find Victoria, my, uh-” Too late, he used her real name. Somehow, he didn't think Sabella would care if he told her the truth. She didn't seem like a government spy. “Girlfriend. And my name isn't Sam, it's Liam. I used Sam because we're, uh, on the run and I didn't trust that guy. We came in here to escape that horde from St. Louis.”
Among the swishing of clothing and grunts while getting dressed, Sabella finally replied. “Ha! I didn't trust him, either. How do you know they are from St. Louis? That's a long way from here.”
“I don't know how to explain it. Some bad people sucked them out of the city and made them come here. To what end I have no idea. How they did it ... ” He knew the old people in the boat had something to do with it. Mind control? A manipulation of the quantum computer? Pheromones? Was anything too crazy in the Apocalypse? “ ... I don't really know, either.”
“Sounds made up. This has to be every dead person in the world. There are so many.”
He thought of all the zombies he'd seen over in Cairo. Though the fields around them were vast, there were far more zombies on the other side of the river right now. Would Sabella believe him? Did her girls need to know of such titanic threats out there?
“There are a lot,” he said with a settled voice.
Minutes later, and still without any noise from below, the girls and their mom were fully dressed again.
“You can turn around. Thanks for that. We haven't had much in the way of courtesy lately.” The mother pulled a scrunchy from her black jeans and used it to gather her hair behind her. Only a few long, curly bangs managed to escape that fate.
She saw him watching. “My hair hates this humidity, but I'm not brave enough to cut it short like this one.” She meant her older daughter.
Sabella and her girls were dressed in typical suburban fare-mostly jeans and airy tops suitable for the thick Missouri air. Sabella's cross remained visible on her exposed neckline and now both girls displayed similar pendants around their necks. She'd said they'd fled from Egypt because of their religion, so it was no shocker they were pretty serious about it.
“You ready?” Sabella asked.
“Yeah, but I was thinking ... “
He intended to explain his own situation further and what might be downstairs, but she clomped down the steps like she owned the place. The girls trailed down after her like a couple of ducklings. Susan, maybe seven years old, held onto the older girl's shirt ahead of her. The youngster waged war between letting out heavy sobs and keeping it in.
“We're coming down,” Sabella shouted.
He tucked the knife in his pocket and followed down the steps. From the stairs he saw into the kitchen, a dining room, and part of the front family room where he'd come in with his girlfriend.
“This way,” he said, taking the lead from Sabella.
Liam strode into the family room, but Victoria and her captors weren't there. He searched behind the loveseat and behind other furniture just to satisfy himself she wasn't being hidden from him. There was one more room upstairs he forgot to check. Could she have been taken up there? Was there a basement?
Liam froze when he saw the faces in the front window.
“Stop!” he hissed. “They see us.”
To their credit, the girls stopped immediately. Like they'd been trained in the art of zombie evasion. Sabella also made a respectable effort to halt, though she was closer to the window than anyone. A gauzy set of drapes blocked the panes of glass, but it wasn't hard to identify the shapes moving around out on the porch.
Slowly, he knelt on the floor and crawled to the sofa-putting it between him and the windows. Seeing his example, the others did the same. It was just long enough they could all huddle there.
“Where would they have gone,” he asked. “My girlfriend isn't here.”
“Was she pretty or pregnant?” Sabella asked seriously.
“Um, yeah, I like her,” he said as if unsure what she was asking. “She definitely isn't pregnant. No way.”
“Of course you like your girlfriend,” she whisper-laughed. “Was she pretty enough that maybe they took her from you for her looks?”
Liam studied the olive-skinned beauty and put two and two together. Sabella continued talking when she saw it click in his mind.
“Margaret and her son must have taken her out to the shed we saw in the window. That's where Elise is. That's where they take all the new girls.”
He was afraid to ask but had to. “What do they do to them over there?”
“If a girl is pregnant, Wilder or his nurse will rip it out, but I'm not sure where that happens. That fat loser said they make the girls visit with patrons in that garage, and I have a pretty good idea what that means. All I know for sure is what they were going to do to me and mine in this house before you saved us. There isn't anything good going on in either place. Since your friend is with my daughter we have to save them both.”
She began to slither on her belly toward the back of the house.
“Where are you going?”
“To save my daughter,” she said just loud enough to be heard over the horde. A few zombies knocked on the glass and the exterior of the house, but it seemed uneven, like they were just doing it because that was their “thing.” Not because they sensed anyone inside. He figured they'd come through the windows if they knew for sure there were living people in the room.
The two daughters held their ground behind the sofa.
“Aren't you going to help my mom?” the older girl said in a snarky voice that reminded him of Victoria. Her glasses sat low on her nose like a librarian glaring at a noisy patron.
It caught him by surprise.
She huffed as if Liam was on the clock. “Are you going to help her, or not?”'
The look in her eyes said he better get his butt in gear.
2
“What are you going to do?” he asked Sabella as she stood next to the back door. Zombies hovered near the back windows just like they did in the front. More drapes covered the glass, making it difficult for anyone to see in, but he never wanted to underestimate how fast that thin glass would break if they were spotted. He crouched down to get out of the zombies' lines of sight while he chatted.
Sabella hadn't let up for a moment since he met her, so it didn't surprise him she was trying to solve the riddle of how to get across the ocean of plague victims. He tried not to take it personally that she wasn't asking him for his advice, but he had to admit he had no idea how to get across, so he was happy to see what she had in mind.
“See that barbeque pit?”
He saw one out the back door, but he couldn't look for long.
“Yes.”
“I'm going to open this door and you're going to wheel it back inside. Can you do that?”
“I think so. Yeah. But why?”
“I'll show you when you get it in here.”
He peeked out the window of the back door to get a better look at the outside. The rear patio was separated from the parking area behind the house by a small hedge, so it was nowhere near as crowded. There were one or two infected milling about near the grill, but it could have been much worse.
“Can your oldest daughter help me?” He pointed to the living room where the pair of girls had stayed.
“My oldest is over there,” she pointed to the people on the nearby roof. “My girls have done enough. You'll be fine. Have a little faith.” She chucked him on the shoulder.
If you only knew what I've seen.
He didn't argue because he trusted her for some reason and because there was no time to wallow
in indecision. The patio was practically zombie free at the moment, and it could fill up in seconds if they weren't careful.
“One sec,” he whispered while holding up his pointer finger. There was no way he was going out there without some kind of serious weapon. The knife in his pocket was fine for what it was, but a farmhouse kitchen probably had something a little more substantial. He skidded on his hands and knees into the kitchen and it didn't take him long to pick out a big meat cleaver. It felt balanced and heavy in his hand and appeared to be extremely sharp.
When he got back to the door, Sabella gave him a grim smile. He felt like he'd earned her approval.
“Ready?” she asked.
He peeked over the bottom edge of the window again and still only saw the two zombies-both men-wandering around the secluded patio. A nearly infinite number of them were everywhere else, but he made a conscious effort not to notice them.
He took a deep breath. “I'm ready.”
“Remember, run out there, pull it back in. That's it.”
Somehow, he didn't think it would be that simple, but it was a goal.
She pulled opened the door just enough to let him out. The two drifters weren't facing his direction, so he had a couple of seconds to really taste the air and think about how his plan was going to work. Unfortunately, he came to the conclusion that no matter how fast he was getting the grill, the two would be on him before he could get back inside. Sabella, for all her planning, didn't seem like she was going to run out and help him.
The grip of the knife became slippery as his adrenaline kicked in. His breathing became short and labored as his heart got a running start for what was about to happen.
The nearest zombie remained oblivious, but the far one was turning toward him.
“Shitballs,” he said under his breath.
The cleaver felt heavy as it became certain he'd need to use it. He judged the distance to the nearest zombie-an older man a foot taller than him-and sprang up. His instinct was to swing the cleaver sideways, but he knew better. Instead, he raised it and then cranked it down on the man's head with everything he had. True to its name, the cleaver hit hard and sank several inches into the zombie's brains.
Since The Sirens Box Set | Books 1-7 Page 183