Reckoning in an Undead Age

by A. M. Geever

  “This is our baby,” Mario said. He took a step toward her. “Here, take him!”

  Miranda looked at the thing in Mario’s arms. It wasn’t their baby. But if that wasn’t their baby, what had happened to him?

  “Where is he?” she asked, desperation growing.

  “He’s right here,” Mario said, his face twisting with anger.

  He started to push it into her arms, to force her to take it. She recoiled, stumbled backward, almost falling when she tripped. Her throat closed, as if it was caught in a vise.

  “What did you do to our baby?”

  Mario’s eyes blazed with sudden anger. His mouth twisted in a sneer. “You did this. It’s your fault he’s like this. Now take the goddamned baby, Miranda! He’s like this because of you and—”

  * * *

  Her arms thrashed and legs kicked, trying to push Mario away, but she was twisted in the sheets. She felt damp, slicked in sweat, heart pounding in her chest. She looked around, eyes wild, expecting to hear more crying, but the room was silent. It wasn’t a familiar room, though. Was she awake or still dreaming?

  Miranda sat up, then took a deep breath. One glance reminded her where she was: Kendall’s bunker.

  They’d settled in one of the apartment domes that stuck out from the central dome like petals on a flower. There were six residence domes and two garden domes. An oval that seemed a little bigger than two of the round domes put together was marked STORAGE and included a wine cellar. Kendall’s apartment was an oval, too, and Phineas had joked he now lived in a doublewide. Rounding out the setup was a swimming pool.

  Miranda got out of bed and padded to the attached bathroom to pee. This dome had four bedrooms, two master suites with their own baths, two doubles with a shared bath between them, and single bedroom. She had turned down one of the master suites, which she now regretted. A warm bath might be just the trick, but she didn’t want to wake Alec, whose room also used this bathroom.

  She left the bathroom and switched on the bedside light. The bunker had a massive supply of clothes, so she helped herself to a soft, stretchy pair of yoga pants, the kind with a wide cut leg, and a few V-neck tee shirts. The shirts had cap sleeves, and the cut hugged her body more than the traditional square tee shirt shape. Even the clothes in this apocalypse bunker were stylish. She searched the dresser for an elastic band before finding it draped over the top of an empty wine bottle. She didn’t remember putting it there.

  She plucked it off the bottle and pulled her hair back. That bottle she’d drunk on her own, a dry Pinot Grigio that had transported her back to parties at her parents’ house when they entertained the political movers and shakers so important to her father’s career. She’d been sure the combination of swimming and the wine would knock her out enough that she wouldn’t dream. Or at least, that she’d be so tired that even a shitty dream like that wouldn’t wake her up, but it hadn’t worked.

  The baby in the dream danced behind her eyelids…shriveled and gray and deformed, the perfect encapsulation of what had happened to Tadpole in one efficient package. Mario’s confused, then angry, face, insisting she hold it, insisting the baby was that way because of her.

  If he hadn’t left, she thought, anger flaring. If he hadn’t left them behind, none of this would have happened and—

  “Fuck this,” she said.

  She looked at herself in the mirror over the dresser. She hadn’t been sleeping well since losing the baby and sending Mario packing. The cumulative effects showed. She had bags under eyes. Mornings were hard since she was chronically sleep deprived. She didn’t have the dreams every night, but enough that she dreaded them. Enough that she drank if she could, to smooth out the ride. If she could get her hands on some Percocet, or something like it, that and a glass of wine always did the trick. She’d drink herself into oblivion every night if that was possible, but there wasn’t always enough alcohol available to do that. She wished, for the millionth time, that she could smoke pot. It grew all over the place, but it just made her paranoid. It had been nice to drink a bottle of Kendall’s good wine. He never came back out, even though he’d left for his room at close to ten in the morning. He’d told them to explore, take a look around, so she might as well.

  Phineas picked the dome they were in when they’d settled in earlier.

  “It has a baby grand piano,” he had said.

  “You play?” Miranda asked.

  “No,” he answered. “But it’s a piano. We’re staying here.”

  After choosing rooms and stowing their gear, they regrouped in the kitchen. The whole place was an open floor plan, probably to counter claustrophobia.

  “You think he’s Kendall Grant?” Rich said, repeating what Alec had just told him.

  “I don’t think it,” Alec said. “I know it. It’s him. One of my mates worked at Grendall Industries and stuck a picture of Kendall’s face on his dartboard. He said it made him feel better about selling his soul. It’s the right part of the States; his name is Kendall, and who else would have the money to build a place like this?”

  Rich said, “I can think of five off the top of my head. You do know what companies were based out of Portland and Seattle, right? There was—”

  “Who’s Kendall Grant?” Phineas asked. At the quizzical looks, he added, “I’m twenty, guys. I wasn’t paying attention to business tycoons.”

  Miranda laughed. “I forget what a kid you are.”

  “Don’t start with trying to pretend I’m too young for you, Miranda. We all know you want a piece of this.” Phineas pointed at himself like he was gameshow hostess showing off a prize.

  “Kendall Grant,” Alec began. “Founded Grendall Industries. It started out as a tech company, but by the time zombies came around, it had its fingers in everything from cloud computing to military weapons systems. It’s him. I’d bet my life on it.”

  “What is he doing here alone?” Miranda asked. “This place is clearly meant to hold more people.”

  “I saw an occupancy plaque on the wall by the storeroom,” said Phineas. “This place can hold a hundred people, with supplies for five years.”

  Miranda’s head swam at the idea of so much food. That would be more than enough to get LO through to their next harvest. They wouldn’t have to risk people going out to scrounge food. If Kendall would share with them, they could set up a corridor from here to LO, something that would decrease the danger of traveling through Portland.

  Rich said, “Maybe no one else made it, and that’s why it’s just him.”

  Even in a place like this, with all the luxe comforts of excessive pre-apocalpytic wealth, Miranda couldn’t imagine a decade of isolation. Just thinking about it gave her a nasty shiver.

  “Where are his weapons?” she said. The attack had depleted LO’s ammunition stores. It wouldn’t hurt to get more if they could.

  Rich nodded. “I’ve been wondering about that. There are the lockers in the main corridor, but a place like this with just three firearms lockers? No way.”

  “What about the security office?” Phineas suggested.

  “There might be something there,” Rich allowed. “But there’s got to be more. If you spend the money to build a place like this, you’re gonna have serious weapons. Three lockers is not that. And there’s got to be food storage somewhere.”

  “And you want it,” Alec said to Rich. A statement of fact, not a question.

  “Not enough to steal from him. Yet,” Rich said. “But we’re facing a serious food shortage. P-Land is helping but they lost crops, too. We don’t have enough to get through the winter, never mind till next fall’s harvest. And we’re taking in people coming for the vaccine.”

  “You could stop taking them in,” Alec said.

  Rich shook his head. “That’s not how we do things. Besides, they’re coming because we sent people out before the blight put us over a barrel. We can hardly tell them to come and then tell them to fend for themselves.”

  “But if we could get some f
ood from him,” Miranda said. “That’d be huge.”

  No one spoke for a minute, each lost in their own thoughts.

  “We have to get to know him better,” Rich said. “If we ask too soon and he says no, it’ll get real awkward real fast.”

  Then Miranda had said, “Maybe he’ll want to come to LO with us. It would only make sense to bring supplies if he did.”

  They had ended the conversation without a firm plan.

  Delilah, still snuggled on the bed, opened an eye when Miranda opened the bedroom door.

  “Wanna come, Liley?” Miranda asked.

  Delilah didn’t budge; that settled that.

  Miranda left her room and walked across the quiet living area. The furnishings alone for this whole complex had probably run a million bucks; how much had it cost to build this place—twenty million? More? She debated putting on her boots for a millisecond, then decided to stick with bare feet. She doubted she had to worry about zombies in this fortress. She left their dome, thinking she’d get a book from the library.

  The overhead lights in the corridor were off, but the floor level track lighting was enough to see by. She’d only given the library a cursory glance earlier. She’d find something to read, and hopefully fall asleep doing it. Anxiety began to gnaw at her stomach at the idea of having another dream like this last one. There was always another bottle of wine if she needed it.

  She was about to turn into the nearest lounge that led through to the dining area, where she could then get to the library, when she saw a light farther down the corridor. Curious, she decided to investigate, and realized the light spilled out from the larger of the garden domes.

  The moisture in the air when she opened the door felt like a balm on her skin. She hadn’t noticed that the bunker was especially dry, but compared to the humidity here, it was. Seconds later, she was surrounded by a riot of green. She’d checked the gardens out earlier. The fresh fruit mystery had been solved then. The smaller circular garden dome was planted with dwarf apple, peach, pear, and plum trees. This dome housed both hydroponics and raised beds. There was probably fertilizer in the storage dome to replenish the soil, and there had to be a composter somewhere.

  A pang of loneliness welled up. Memories of the farm at home in California, and the people who worked there, tugged at her. She wondered how they were doing. If Timmy, whom Allan had tried to fire after he’d been bitten by a zombie, was doing okay. Was Harold still working there? She hoped so. She wanted to know where she could find him if she ever went home so she could wring his neck for selling them out, his ability to find good lingerie be damned. Maybe we can stop at that house on the way back, she thought, recalling the stash she had found on their way to OHSU’s main campus. The look of surprise, followed by hungry desire, on Mario’s face when she’d worn the lingerie bubbled to the surface. For a moment, before she could shut it down, longing made her body hum, but a burst of anger followed it. She concentrated on the smell of the plants and soil, the warmth that caressed her skin. Longing banished, she could almost hear Father Walter’s voice playing devil’s advocate when she’d pitched the idea of the vertical farms to him and Father Gilbert. Mario and Emily had been with her for moral support.

  “Jesus,” she muttered.

  Mario was popping up in more than her dreams tonight. She resolved again to get him out of her head. She’d just been a kid, Phineas’ age, when she proposed they try building a vertical farm. She chuckled to herself… No wonder he thought he was old enough for her. At twenty, after surviving those first few horrible months, she’d thought she was old enough for anything.

  She heard the murmur of a low voice and followed the sound. Kendall tended to small plants at a nearby raised bed. They were more than seedlings, but still too small for her to tell what they might be. She approached, clearing her throat before speaking.

  “Hi,” she said. “Mind if I join you?”

  Kendall started. His eyes flicked to hers, then slid away. “Okay.”

  Miranda closed the distance and stood on the opposite side of the raised bed. There was another to her left. Unlike the one they stood at, it was low to the floor. Three circular containers with soil in them jutted up from the floor, with six inches of shaggy green leaves poked up from the soil. They weren’t containers, on closer look, more like expandable tubes about two feet wide. They could be pulled up, she realized, changing the height. They reminded her of the round tunnels that could be made longer or shorter, and were flexible enough to curve, that she and her brothers had crawled through when they were kids.

  “Potatoes?”

  Kendall looked up, then to the next garden bed.

  “Yes,” he said. “How did you know?”

  “It’s what I do at home. I’m a farmer. It’s smart to grow them up rather than down. Then the bed doesn’t need to be as deep.”

  Kendall nodded, then looked back to the plants in front of him.

  “Can’t sleep either?” Miranda asked.

  “I’ve always been a night owl.”

  “I guess time’s different down here,” she said.

  Kendall nodded. It was like talking to a three-year-old on the phone, the adult needing to offer all the conversation prompts.

  “How long have you been here?”

  Kendall stopped thinning out the plants. “Since the beginning.”

  “You’ve been by yourself the whole time?” She couldn’t keep the astonishment out of her voice. It would account for his somewhat limited conversational skills.

  “Just the last seven.”

  “What happened to the others?”

  He glanced up at her before answering. “Van, my— Well, he got me here, then went back out to see who else he could pick up and never came back. The security team was here when I arrived. After a while they wanted to go outside.”

  “No one else made it?”

  Kendall looked at her with a furrowed brow, then nodded.

  “That’s a long time,” Miranda said, softly.

  “I’ve always been an introvert.”

  Another silence. She said, “Can I help? You’re thinning them all?”

  “Yes.” He paused, then added, “That would be nice.”

  She began thinning the row of tiny plants in the row in front of her, carrots she now saw, enjoying the feel of the soft, dark earth on her fingers. Seven years… It explained his absence for the rest of the day after their meal. Four people after years of isolation had to be overwhelming.

  “Are you a night owl?”

  She looked at Kendall, surprised that he had initiated some conversation.

  “Not sleeping very well.”

  They lapsed back into silence. Miranda moved away from Kendall as she worked her way down the row. She hadn’t done it intentionally, but maybe it would make him more comfortable. She couldn’t wrap her head around being alone for so long. She’d never thought about it, to be honest, but was pretty sure she’d be jumping for joy at the idea of people to talk to after so long. But she wasn’t Kendall.

  She was about to start thinning the next row and work her way back toward the center of the bed, when he said, “How do you do it?”

  She looked at him. He was studying her intently.

  “Do what?”

  “Chase them off. I saw them move away… When you helped your friend.”

  Now it made sense, why he’d let them in after ignoring them for two days. He wanted to know how she repelled zombies. They hadn’t known how much, if any, of the scuffle he’d seen. When he hadn’t asked, she thought maybe he hadn’t seen it. Then he disappeared after they ate, and they’d seen neither hide nor hair of him since. It was weird he hadn’t asked immediately. Then again, he hadn’t interacted with real, live human beings in quite some time.

  “The zombies, you mean?”

  Kendall nodded.

  “It’s a side effect of the vaccine if—”

  Kendall’s voice was a shocked whisper. “There’s a vaccine?”

 
“Yeah,” she said, beginning to fully comprehend just how isolated he’d been. “There’s been one for about five years. The first one—” She stopped when she saw Kendall’s mouth fall open, and his eyes go wider. “You really don’t know anything about this?”

  Kendall shook his head.

  “Oh.”

  She took a moment to think about what and how much to say. This guy was so isolated, it probably didn’t matter what she told him. She hadn’t asked, but was starting to think he hadn’t been outside since getting here.

  “There are two kinds of vaccines. The first is an inoculation, so you can’t become infected by the virus. The other is post-bite. If you get it within twelve hours of being bitten, it’ll save you, but you have to take it every day.”

  Kendall looked dazed. Miranda continued.

  “They were developed in California. There were a couple different groups working together, and…well, long story short, one group kept the vaccines and have been using them to stay in power ever since.”

  “And the other groups?”

  “There was a treaty eventually, called the Agreement. The other group gets a small amount from the City… It’s kind of complicated. The important part is they’ve reverse-engineered the post-bite, and were working on the other, but in secret.”

  Kendall’s brow furrowed. “How do you know all this?”

  “Because I’m from that other group. We stole the preventative vaccine serum to try and break the monopoly, but…” She sighed, remembering the disastrous journey to Santa Cruz: New Jerusalem, everyone who had died, nearly losing Jeremiah to the people in Santa Cruz who they’d helped. Connor. “That didn’t go as planned. But we found another guy who was immune, and one of the virologists who worked on the first set of vaccines was with us, so we came here to try again.”

  “Because of the vaccine institute,” Kendall said.

  Miranda nodded.

  “And it makes people repel zombies?”

  “Not everyone.” She paused, trying to think what to call Jeremiah. “It was a different subject’s antibodies this time, and what turned out to be a different strain of the virus. He repelled them, which we’d never seen before. But with the vaccine, repelling them is a side effect of having AB negative blood, which is the same as his was. It doesn’t happen with other blood types.”