They made it to the curb side of their bus just as the city bus screeched to a sudden stop. Its digital sign flashed: X-zone Quadrant R-5. The door squeaked open, followed by shouting. The man barely made it off the bus before puking in the gutter.
Justin turned away. “Gross me out.”
Finally, the man went back onto the bus. With the phhsst of the air brakes, it turned around in a parking lot but didn’t get back on the highway.
“That was close,” Dean muttered.
Luther mumbled something. His eyes popped open. The gun in Dean’s hand wavered.
Luther puckered his mouth repeatedly before rasping, “You all are scaring me. Hold on. I can’t get my mouth to cooperate. It’s like that weird feeling when the Novocain starts wearing off.”
“Luther, are you—turning?” Scarlett asked gently.
Luther scrunched his mouth awkwardly. “That’s a big hell no! I would have turned hours ago. I vaguely remember pulling over at some point.”
Scarlett studied his face. Despite his bloodshot eyes, he showed no signs of the first side effect: red-rimmed bulging eyes, the kind that stared blankly.
“Let’s get you on the bus,” Dean said, eyeing the traffic exiting the highway.
“That’s what I wanted to say,” Luther said as if his memory had returned. “Get the gas cans from the camper. And my duffle.”
“On it!” Justin took off.
With Luther’s help, Scarlett and Dean labored Luther up the bus steps while Justin collected the gas cans.
Luther forced an obviously painful laugh. “My bad, shouldn’t have had that extra order of fries.”
Mindy followed, looking around, not too sure.
“Ella’s inside,” Scarlett said, hoping to convince Mindy to join them.
They laid Luther on the first bed they came to.
“You’re sweating up a storm.” Dean gave Scarlett a double dose of furrowed brows.
“It’s a good sign,” Scarlett assured. She had never seen anyone last this long after a bite. “His antibodies must be fighting the infection.”
Ella and Twila rushed over.
“I want you gals at the back of the bus. Now!” Dean said rather sternly.
“Water,” Luther rasped.
Dean offered his canteen.
“Uncle Luther needs the magical tea,” Twila insisted from the back. “Ella, can he have one of Mateo’s bottles?” Twila’s beseeching eyes took over her face.
It was a tough question, one she never would have asked Ella.
“Sure, it’s his special crystal.” Ella rummaged through her pack. “Here.” She handed a bottle to Twila.
Scarlett grabbed a plastic cup from the cupboard. “Pour most of it in the cup and give me the rest of the bottle.” Scarlett patted Luther’s wounds with a washcloth soaked in the crystal-charged water while Dean held the cup to Luther’s mouth.
Mateo started whimpering. Ella fumbled with the pacifier. Irritated, Scarlett glanced back at Ella. It wasn’t a good time for a crying baby.
Ella flashed the most incredulous look. “It’s not mijo.” Ella lifted the X-large T-shirt she wore over the baby sling. Mateo slept soundly.
“What?” Dean gaped.
“Sorry,” Mindy said. “It’s past feeding time.”
They all turned to Mindy.
“Well, all be dern,” Dean marveled. “Starla survived. How on earth?”
“Baby Starla!” Twila cried out. “I couldn’t feel her energy. I thought she went back to the stars.”
Nor had Scarlett. “Mindy, what happened? I know it’s difficult to talk about. We must know,” Scarlett insisted.
“I, uh, hid in the attic after you people left me there to—to die,” Mindy accused with the calmness of ordering a pizza.
“Hey, you’re the one who took off when Ella went into labor,” Justin contradicted while heaving Luther’s duffle down the aisle.
Dean shuffled about uncomfortably. “I still can’t forgive myself for that horrendous oversight. Things got out of hand with Ella in labor and the horde . . .”
Tears pooled in Mindy’s eyes. “I’m so happy for you, Ella. Your baby’s a Starseed, too. I see his beautiful energy from here.”
“Mindy,” Scarlett pursued, “How’d you survive? It’s been over a week.”
“This man, you know, Robertson? He came by selling food after the HAZMAT guys left. Anyway, I needed food. And he didn’t have any bad energy, so I let him in the lodge.” Mindy’s face went white with fear. “That night a horde snuck in from the basement. Robertson helped me to the attic with a crate of food and water. He went back for his rifle. And never came back . . .”
“Poor fella.” Dean shook his head.
“It’s a miracle you survived.” Ella rubbed the jade crucifix around her neck.
“Uncle Luther’s very brave!” Twila elated.
“Aw, shucks.” Luther looked away bashfully.
“Sure thought you were a goner,” Dean confessed.
“You and me both. It’s official. I’m immune. Thanks, Aunt Mattie.” Luther wiped off the sweat beading his forehead, still looking a bit peaked.
“Good to hear. But enough of the chit-chat,” Dean said. “Time to get out of Dodge.”
“Not gonna happen,” Luther blustered. “You know those digital road signs? Well, they’re flashing a Shelter-in-Place order. Effective at nine p.m. All violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent.”
“Are you flippin’ kidding me?” It was Scarlett’s time to go ballistic.
“So now what?” Justin flopped onto the edge of the bunk bed.
“Can’t we just park the bus behind the warehouse until it’s safe?” Ella blurted.
“No freakin’ way.” Justin looked away at Ella’s nasty frown. “I didn’t want to say anything yet, but—”
Dean flashed Justin a stern look. “Spit it out, son.”
“DiNozzo said they’re deploying project CLEAN UP. Any day! If we don’t get to Tent City—”
“Slow down,” Dean said with growing impatience. “How does this affect us—exactly?”
“They’ll start rounding up the illegals in Tent City. And send them to re-education camps.” Justin’s tone turned ominous. “Those who refuse re-education—hashtag, brainwashed—are branded as traitors and thrown into Zoat.”
Dean cursed under his breath. “What the devil happened to our beloved country?”
“Well, we are chipped citizens?” Scarlett reminded.
“I wasn’t finished,” Justin spouted caustically. “They’re leveling Tent City and sniffing out the smuggler tunnels.”
“Why now, after all this time?” Dean questioned.
Justin shrugged. “The Resistance is winning. More and more people defect every month. Last State’s running out of worker bees to support its infrastructure. Even some Enforcers are defecting.”
Dean rubbed his chest, looking like he was at his wit’s end. The heavy responsibility of chaperoning their group was taking its toll on the poor man. Her heart ached for him. He had sacrificed so much for them when all he had ever wanted was to live out the rest of his days in solitude.
“What if . . .” Scarlett paused, lost in deep thought.
“We’re listening,” Dean encouraged.
It was a dangerous plan. But staying there was undeadly. “We can still get to Tent City,” Scarlett said. “By way of the Forbidden Zone.”
“Are you cuh-ray-zee?” Ella cried out.
“You’re forgetting something,” Justin rebuked. “How do we get this huge bus into the Forbidden Zone?”
“Hell, with the bulldozer scoop rigged to the front, we’ll bust through,” Luther said. “From what I saw, officials are too damn busy trying to contain this RedDead Alert.”
“Alrighty then—” Dean paced the aisle. He pulled out the map from his back pocket, spreading it over the dinette table. “We’re ’bout here.” He tapped the map with his index finger.
They fixated on th
e map as if it held their fates in its intricate lines.
“Hmm.” Dean grinned. “Looks like Highway Two eighty-seven runs smackdab through the Forbidden Zone.” He measured the inches. “According to the map, we can be there in a few hours.”
“I’m for that!” Luther seconded the motion.
“There you have it. A workaround that solves the lockdown and power grid issue.” Dean’s voice rippled with excitement.
Justin took Ella in his arms and exclaimed, “We’re driving through the Forbidden Zone like we own it!”
But in the far reaches of Scarlett’s mind, tentacles of evil slithered through the etherworlds, waiting for an unguarded opportunity to ensnare them. She must maintain her Merkaba bubble of protection. At all times!
Chapter 19
Zac Padilla tugged the maintenance cap lower over his forehead and kept his head down as he strode for the hotel’s kitchen. A staunch believer in the gray man theory, he wandered the hotel’s service corridors with the electrician tool bag he had liberated from the electrical room in order to hide in plain sight. He was stuck inside the hotel due to a RedDead Alert drill.
Bad timing for a drill, he cursed. After his preemptive strike on the hitman, Zac couldn’t exactly extend his stay at the swanky hotel. He was supposed to be dead. Zomb dead. The Do Not Disturb sign on the door should buy him another hour or two. But when the maid discovered the hitman’s twice-dead body in the bathtub, security would manually scour the video feed for the suspect.
The tension twisting his solar plexus warned the shit was about to hit the fan. He was damn sure of it. Probably another rebel attack. The Resistance had amped up their efforts. He wasn’t worried about a horde attack in the heart of Last State. Enforcers quickly neutralized the occasional Infected Incidents within the inner Zones. Which usually started with a victim of an untimely heart attack or stroke who unwittingly infected everyone within lunging range. Hey, shit happens.
Just like the botched hit on his life. Cutting deeper into his pride, Zac finally accepted that his hard-earned Elite contacts were worthless. He had gone from an honorary Elite to a dangerous dissident. Overnight. And the optics weren’t looking good for him anytime in the near future. He should have known better than to tangle with the Elites. They always won.
To further complicate his escape, the ABC Zones had recently upgraded to 6G, which meant state-of-the-art facial recognition. Thanks to a computer nerd contact, he had recently added a pair of Phantom glasses to his bag of tricks. The special lenses faked-out the constantly learning face-mapping A.I. by bouncing the camera’s infrared lights back to the source, creating a glare—not a face.
The drawback to using the glasses, the glare stuck out like Rudolph’s blaring red nose if a technician happened to be monitoring the surveillance cameras. Fortunately for him, Last State relied more on A.I. than on human techs.
How did it get this far? People had lost their privacy, freedoms, and rights in the wake of technology. More like the dawn of transhumanism. Which just happened to coincide with the pandemic. A coincidence? He didn’t have time to dwell on the downfall of America. He had to get out of that hotel. Pronto. Hell, he had to get out of Last State. With Scarlett!
Unable to avoid the array of surveillance cameras, he explored the housekeeping corridors dressed in the gray maintenance coveralls he had boosted from the laundry room. His peculiar “safe passage” ability highlighted the kitchen’s emergency door exit as the only safe option. It led to the loading dock. He would just have to hotwire a vehicle before security tagged him.
His spider senses kicked in. Aw, this isn’t a drill. An intense knowing forewarned X-strains were staging an attack on the heart of Last State. Bolstering his machismo, Zac harnessed his manifestation powers. Act like you belong.
He made it to the kitchen—a flurry of activity with cooks in white aprons scrambling about in the breakfast rush. He stopped at a circuit breaker and casually opened the panel. To get an idea of the camera’s scope, he peered over the breaker’s door panel, observing. Sure enough, when he switched to soft-focus mode, which he likened to listening with one’s eyes, the path to the kitchen’s emergency door exit glowed in his mind’s eye. Beyond that, a bitmap image of a delivery truck appeared. Bingo!
A waiter slammed through the swinging doors with a tray of steak and eggs, strawberries, and buttery toast. He dropped the tray next to the chef.
“Err, now what? The eggs aren’t yellow enough?” the haggard chef huffed. “These Elites are a bunch of—”
“No!” the waiter shrieked. Suddenly everyone turned to the waiter. “Security’s evacuating the dining room. They ordered everyone to their rooms.” The waiter stood there, bug-eyed, lost in obvious fear. “Infecteds”—he trembled—“stormed the ABC Zones.”
“What about us?” an employee shouted.
“Yeah, what are we supposed to do?” someone else cried out.
“I’ll ring management.” The chef grabbed the MeDevice from his apron.
Someone clicked on the widescreen TV mounted to the wall. Last State was notorious for livestreaming cits caught in the acts of disobedience. Hence, the minute-to-minute digital dossiers they maintained on each citizen. The RedDead Alert banner scrolled across the top of the screen and ordered citizens to shelter in place. Zac was blown away by the hundreds of people running from an atrocious army of marching zombs.
“Where is that?” someone shouted.
“A-zone,” another voice shouted back.
Zac recognized the top of the Capitol building in the background. “Son of a bitch.” His intuition had been right. How the hell did X-strains make it into the most secured location of Last State? Then it clicked. So, that’s what they were doing, herding citizens from A-Zone to Zhetto, where they’d be caught between the Zoat zombs and X-strains. Clever. All the more reason to get out of there.
A security guard barged through the swinging doors. “People, listen up. That new virulent strain is here. Get to the breakroom and barricade inside. Before they flip the switch! After that, all doors will be locked from the mainframe.”
“Thanks for the lowdown, Manny,” the chef shouted above the panic. People ran for the elevator and stairwell.
“The Elevator’s not working!” Zac overheard while he tried the emergency door amongst the chaos. He prayed damn hard security was occupied monitoring the Elites and hordes, not the help.
“Aw, shit!” The emergency door didn’t budge. He had missed his chance by seconds. Maybe not. The red pull-down fire alarm next to the circuit panel caught his attention. Would the building’s mainframe computer automatically unlock the emergency exits during a fire? After all, it was a smart building, built with the latest technology. He was about to find out.
Before he went for broke, he swiped a doggie bag from the stainless-steel counter and stuffed it into the electrician bag. He didn’t care what it was. Calories were needed, pronto. He activated the fire alarm. His well-trained hearing registered the faint click of the locking mechanism under the commotion. He tried the door. Unlocked. There is a God!
The chef stared at him in disbelief. “Sir! You can’t go out there during a lockdown!”
“Lock the door behind me. And no matter what—no matter how much screaming you hear, do not open this door!” Zac slammed the door in the chef’s face.
Zac stood outside on the loading dock ramp, casing the lot. He took in a deep breath and nearly gagged. The air reeked with decay. Zombs were close if he could smell them. He selected the largest wrench along with the 9mm from the electrician bag, complete with silencer, courtesy of the ill-fated hitman. That’s when he spotted the delivery truck with the Lone Star Bread Company logo painted on the side, the same truck he had seen with his soft-focus vision.
For some reason, a man sat in the driver’s seat. He must have been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time: The No Zone. That’s what they called it when one didn’t make it to safety within minutes of a RedDead Alert. Idiocracy at it
s best. What could one expect from a country run by the rich and powerful as opposed to brains?
I might as well help the truck driver get to safety, he thought as he sprinted to the driver’s side of the mid-size delivery truck. “Excuse me, can I get a lift?”
“Lockdown. Roads closed,” the man said with a thick Slavic accent. He opened the passenger door for Zac. “Okay to wait inside truck.” He motioned.
Zac gladly climbed into the GMC’s cab.
“Danovich. Please to meet.” The man held out a buffed arm for a shake.
“Reynolds,” Zac quickly introduced, according to his latest counterfeit CitChip.
“Is safe?” Danovich’s huge bushy eyebrows arched into Vs. “My mudak boss only pay after route finished.”
Zac didn’t need to answer that one when the tornado sirens went off, for it was a clear sunny morning.
“Zhizn’ ebet meya!” Danovich’s eyes widened, rivaling bottle caps. “Truck, not good place,” he muttered on.
“You’re absolutely right. Look, I can get us out of here.” Zac knew his way around the ABC Zones. He could always count on his pixilated soft-focus vision to get him to safety. He certainly didn’t want to be there when the zombs came marching in.
The delivery man didn’t need any prodding. He started the truck. “No worries, Danovich, best driver in class.”
Zac looked from side to side for the exit. This area was a maze of alleys and service roads used for deliveries. When they finally made it out of the maze, the sirens stopped. “Right, on Main Street.” Zac pointed.
The truck turned the corner so fast he thought it might roll over. “Yee-ha!” the truck driver whooped. “Danovich, fastest driver in class!”
All four wheels finally caught pavement. “Great,” Zac acknowledged with a friendly smile. The man drives like a lunatic.
When the screaming started, he and Danovich shared pensive eye contact. Up ahead, a crowd of frantic citizens stuck in the No Zone rushed the truck. But it was what they ran from that sent the hackles on the back of his neck quivering. From his front-row seat, he watched the X-strains gain on the unfortunate citizens.
Only The Dead Don't Die | Book 4 | Finding Home Page 18