by Amber Wyatt
“I am curious. How does this help us get into the cockpit?” Thomas asked, amused at her childish enthusiasm.
“Passenger fifty-seven,” Gina replied. “The last one that Hana shot. I think she was a member of the crew.” She pointed and they looked out. The body of the zombie in question lay in ankle deep water, only a few feet away from the bottom of the slide. Gina carefully sat down on the top of the slide, pushed off and slid down, pistol held at the ready. At the bottom she flashed a triumphant grin back up at the others, then stepped out on to a thick mat of weeds and reeds. This part of the swamp was shallow, with solid ground only a few inches beneath the surface of the water.
She walked carefully over to the corpse, pistol at the ready, but then she relaxed as she saw the mess that Hana’s bullet had made of the zombie’s head. There, that’s what I was looking for. Gina pulled the lanyard of the security pass over the corpse’s head, paused a moment, and then out of curiosity unzipped the fanny pack on its stomach. There was a water-logged and illegible passport, some cheap jewelry that had tarnished badly in the swamp’s water, and a plastic Ziploc bag with a revolver in it. Nice, thought Gina, examining the pistol. You look useful. She zipped it into a pocket in her jacket and stood back up to wave the security card at the others. “Let’s try this on the door,” she called up to them.
The others were not even looking at her, they were all looking over her head. That’s when Gina realized that she could hear a high-pitched whirring. That’s weird. It sounds like the drones. She turned around and her face went pale. The upside-down canoe was moving slowly but steadily towards her, through the water. And above it flew two drones. One at the back, and one to the side. The drones were not following the canoe Gina realized immediately. They were following their control bracelet, and the last person who had been wearing it.
“Oh my God. Tristan?” she whispered.
There was confused shouting from behind her and then the sound of someone else sliding down the escape chute. Rob pounded past her, splashing as he threw himself into the muddy water.
“Rob, no!” Gina screamed.
“Rob, get out of the water. It might not be him!” Hugh shouted.
They were all shouting at him to stop but Rob ignored them and started pushing through the water until he reached the canoe. He grabbed the ends of it with both hands and flipped it over. Underneath it was Tristan, soaked, pale and clutching his wounded arm. Rob helped him stagger up the shallow sand bank out of the water.
“Hey guys. I’m here!” He laughed weakly at them. They all looked so serious, and they were aiming their weapons at him. He must have really given them a fright. “Hey, point that shit away from me. I don’t want to get shot again.” Even Rob had stepped away, the smile slipping from his face as he raised up his shotgun and pointed it at Tristan’s head. “Rob, bro, chill out. It’s me.”
“Your arm, Tristan. You’re bleeding.” Rob shook his head sadly.
“I know I’m bleeding! Philip fucking shot me when he fell in the water. It’s serious, bro. I need a hospital. A proper hospital. God knows what germs I’ve picked up in this water.”
“No, buddy,” Rob’s face was twisted as if in terrible pain, but his voice was gentle. “Your other arm.”
Tristan had opted to go sleeveless in his assault vest to match Behnke. His eyes glanced down at his right hand pressing against his gunshot wound, and then slid slowly up his right arm to the bicep where the clear outline of a bite mark was slowly seeping blood. He looked up, understanding dawning in his eyes.
“I can feel it. Like a tingling all over. Ah shit… I thought it was just the blood loss or shock or something.” Tristan winced hard, and his strong shoulders spasmed. “I’m sorry, bro. I can’t stop… myself…”
“Tristan, stop,” pleaded Rob. He kept the shotgun aimed at his best friend’s head but took an involuntary step backwards. Tristan’s head came back up slowly, but his face was blank. He slowly released his grip on his wounded arm, both hands falling to his sides, and stood up straight, staring at Rob. Then his lips pulled back, baring his teeth. “Oh God,” Rob said to the thing that had been his friend, “Tristan I can’t do this, man.”
Gina cursed. She did not have a clear shot; Rob was in the way. She started to step to the side, the thick mud sucking at her shoes.
Tristan took one step forward. Then another. But before his foot touched the ground there was a colossal explosion and his head exploded. Everyone back up in the plane flinched away from Behnke who was holding the Piledriver with both arms braced straight against its recoil. A wisp of blue smoke curled out of the pistol’s barrel.
“Did you see that shot?” he crowed, grinning and looking around proudly. “That was fifty feet, at least!”
Hana was speechless with horror. Even Thomas, long since desensitized to his employer’s callous behavior, was aghast. Behnke had very, very few friends; and he had just blown the head off one of them.
“What?” Behnke looked at the cold faces around him, puzzled. “He was infected! He had already turned. I just saved Rob’s life.” He just could not understand some people’s ingratitude. I don’t know why they are looking at me all butthurt like that. He was a fucking zombie. And I just nailed an awesome headshot from over fifty feet!
“Rob?” Gina slowly got up from the mud where she had dropped when Behnke fired. “Rob, you okay?”
There was total silence, broken only by the hum of the drones. Rob was immobile, saying nothing at all. Clearly, he had heard every word that Behnke had just said. As close as she was, Gina could see his hands gripping the shotgun so hard that his fingers had turned white. For what seemed an endless ten seconds, everyone watched the tension radiating off his hunched shoulders, wondering how he would react. Then to Gina’s relief, he simply took a deep breath and relaxed as he exhaled, standing up a little straighter. “Behnke’s right,” he said quietly. “Tristan was one of them. He was going to attack me.”
Rob did not turn around. He did not want the others to see the tears streaming down his face. He walked over to his best friend’s body and looked down. The .44 magnum, hollow-point bullet had mushroomed flat against Tristan’s forehead and then punched inwards to deliver a catastrophic amount of kinetic energy into the brain and skull. Tristan’s face was crumpled like a rubber mask lying on the ground. That was all that was left of him above the neck. Behind the grotesquely flat face, the rest of the head was missing, scattered all over the swamp.
Rob leaned down, unclipped Tristan’s body camera, and turned it off. Then he unzipped one of Tristan’s vest pockets and dug around a bit until he found the spare memory cards. He transferred all of them into a plastic baggie, dropped in the camera, then shoved the bag into a pocket in his own vest. Lastly, he took off the drone control bracelet and put it on his own wrist.
Behnke grinned with delight as he saw Rob retrieve the memory cards. Shit we nearly lost all that cool footage of me from the farm. Thank God we got it back! But even Behnke realized that mentioning it out loud might come across as a little insensitive, just at that moment. He made a mental note to hold some kind of memorial service when they got out of here. With himself, of course, on camera giving a kick-ass eulogy for his best friend, Tristan. It will look perfect in the credits at the end of the documentary.
Back down on the marshy sand bar, the two figures looked down at Tristan’s body.
“Go on. You go and open that cockpit door, and get that chest,” Rob said quietly to Gina. “I’m just going to take a moment here.”
Gina could not find the right words to say. She squeezed him once on the shoulder and then walked back to the emergency slide. In a few seconds she had climbed back up to the door, where Thomas leaned out and pulled her up the last few feet.
Despite Thomas’s concern that there was no electrical power to open the door, whatever backup mechanism was in place still worked and the locks on the door clunked as Gina swiped the card on the access panel. Thomas gripped the handle, but bef
ore opening the door he turned to look at Hana and Hugh, who were waiting on each side, rifles ready to fire. They had no idea how many zombies were behind the door. The cockpit could be full of them.
“Remember, only headshots count. Are you ready?”
“Yup,” Hana nodded grimly, the butt of her SCAR tucked tight into her shoulder.
Thomas wrenched open the door and the three of them shoved their weapons forward, fingers ready on their triggers. But there was nothing waiting for them behind the door. Thomas shone his flashlight around the cockpit. In the moldy pilot’s seat, a solitary zombie turned weakly and stretched its arms towards them, its shoulders still pinned back tightly by the seat harness.
“There’s no chest here,” Thomas said, shining his torch into each corner. Then he took deliberate aim and fired a single shot. Brains and skull fragments splashed across the instrument panel. The zombie slumped back into its chair. The three of them pointed their weapons down at the floor and went back outside, letting the door click shut behind them.
“So what now?” Gina asked, looking over at Hana. “After all of that, the chest isn’t here.” She felt completely deflated. “How are we supposed to find it now? It could be anywhere inside the quarantine zone.”
Wilkins’s eyes lingered for a moment on Rob, still standing over Tristan’s body down in the water, but then he turned to face the others and cleared his throat loudly to get their attention. A circle of curious faces stared back at him.
“Actually, I think I have a pretty good idea where it is.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Oops
Federal Penitentiary, Fort Lauderdale, Quarantine Zone.
The medical clinic in the federal penitentiary was cold and Steven shivered. This was not what he had expected when he had signed up for the internship program at college.
“There’s your guy,” Doctor Lyons, a tough-looking lady wearing a white coat and with a stethoscope around her neck, peeled off blood-spattered surgical gloves and threw them into a bright yellow bin marked ‘Biohazard’. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder at a body bag laid out on a gurney against the wall. Steven breathed a sigh of relief. He had never seen a corpse before, and was relieved that this one was covered up. Still, he could see the unmistakable angles of what was clearly a human body poking through the thick rubber material of the bag.
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said, unable to tear his gaze away from the body bag in front of him. He realized that the doctor was scowling at him, and he jerked forward to go grab the end of the trolley. “Sorry, Ma’am. It’s my first day as an intern. I wasn’t expecting this.”
“Yeah well, I wasn’t expecting my career to lead me here, but that’s what happens when you try doing someone’s rhinoplasty after six hours of drinking cosmopolitans and tequila shots the night before. The board yanks your license for eighteen months and your only future career option is in the federal penitentiary service.” Her voice was harsh, but her eyes had softened. “First day, huh? Come on then. I need a cigarette. I’ll help you load him.” She threw a clipboard casually on top of the body, grabbed the other end of the gurney and the two of them maneuvered it out of the door. “Harry, you keep mopping all that up now, and throw the sheets into the hazard bin after you’re done, okay? Hello, Harry? Okay?”
The aging orderly in the clinic grunted something that could have been an acknowledgement and plunged his mop lethargically up and down in a bucket of disinfectant. The door swung shut behind them and Lyons shook her head as they wheeled the trolley down the hallway towards the staff carpark.
“Well,” she looked at his nametag, “Steven. Here’s your first tip working here. If I send you into one of the blocks to pick up a body, you bag the body there, okay? Right where it’s laying. The block cleaners have to clean the mess up anyway, and bagging them on location keeps the clinic nice and clean, see?”
“Got it,” he gulped. “Um, is there usually a lot of mess?”
“If they have multiple stab wounds to the neck, hell yeah there’s a mess. Goddamn Harry. I must have told him a hundred times. Bag them in the block.” They paused to open the doors into the carpark, then pushed the trolley down the ramp. “I can examine them and certify them dead just as easy when they’re in the bag. If you bring them back to the clinic before bagging them, and they drip body fluids all over my floor, then you get to spend the morning mopping and disinfecting, like Harry.”
“Uh, Doctor Lyons? I don’t know where the morgue is that I’m supposed to take the body to.”
“Oh right. Don’t worry, it’s easy. Just punch in last destination on the GPS. That’s the only place we go to.” She stopped at the bottom of the ramp and dug around in her coat pocket until she found her cigarettes and lighter. “Okay now, you see this form?” she tapped the clipboard lying on the body bag. “Make sure the mortuary clerk signs all three copies, and you bring back the bottom one, okay?”
“Sign all three. Bring back the bottom one. Got it.”
“Good. Take that one,” she pointed at an ambulance in the corner of the lot. “Keys are in the sunshield.”
“It’s got a flat,” Steven said. He could see the deflated tire from where they were.
“Goddammit,” she already had a cigarette in her mouth, “Harry was supposed to get that changed. Okay, uh…” she looked around. “Take the other ambulance over there. The warden says we’re not supposed to use that one, but fuck it.” She pointed down at a small red lever at the edge of the trolley. “That’s the locking catch that releases the wheels, so they fold up when you push the gurney in. Just give it a firm push and keep your hands up here when you do. If you trap your fingers underneath, it hurts like a motherfucker. And then when you pull the gurney back out, you drop the wheels and use the same catch to lock the wheels in the lowered position okay?”
Steven nodded, and wheeled his passenger around to the back of the ambulance. He propped the doors open, undid the red locking catch, carefully placed his hands on top of the rear bar and shoved hard. The wheels folded neatly underneath the gurney and it slid smoothly into the back of the ambulance. He saw another catch which locked the gurney in place, pushed it down, grabbed the clipboard and closed the doors, feeling pleased with himself. Actually, this is pretty cool. Wait until I tell Mom about my first day. Delivering a real body to the morgue!
He went around to the driver’s seat, found the keys in the sunshield, and started up the engine. The GPS was easy to use and within ten seconds a calm, female voice announced that they were returning to their last destination; journey time twelve minutes.
He put the ambulance in gear and drove slowly past Doctor Lyons with his window down.
“You okay? Know where you’re going?” she squinted as cigarette smoke curled up past one eye.
“Yes, Ma’am. Twelve minutes away.”
“Hey,” she pulled the cigarette out of her mouth and looked at him suspiciously. “You do have a driving license, right?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Okay, drive carefully. And make sure they sign for him.”
Steven tipped a finger to his forehead in salute and rolled up the window as he pulled out of the staff car park. Then he checked the GPS screen again and turned left out of the prison gates towards the highway, humming to himself.
Three miles to the northwest of Steven’s ambulance, Qureshi was speeding up the long straight access road to the IDRC, with his own pair of bagged bodies in the back of his truck. This, he had decided, would be his last bounty claim. He knew when he was starting to push his luck and he always stuck to the rule of quitting while he was ahead. If the authorities did not arrest him, then for sure Marisa would realize what he was up to. She was already starting to get a little too suspicious.
Taylor had guessed correctly, when he surmised that Qureshi had a captive zombie, which he was using to infect human captives in order to deliver them to the IDRC in exchange for bounties. The only thing they had not guessed, was where Qureshi was gettin
g his supply of fat, middle-aged men from.
In his own mind, he kind of blamed Marisa herself for the whole scheme. His girlfriend was a tall blonde of Norwegian extraction, who worked as a waitress in a bikini bar just south of Las Olas Boulevard. Her spectacular cleavage, long legs and eye-catching sleeve of tattoos always ensured that she got more than her fair share of attention from the customers. And one night after work, as he massaged her aching feet and they both knocked back a couple of cold beers, she had given him the idea.
“I just wish they could fucking disappear,” she had hissed angrily. It had been a tough shift and her normally pretty face was tired and drawn.
Qureshi knew immediately who she was referring to when she said ‘they’. Marisa was constantly hassled and often stalked after work by the fat, overweight, BMW-driving businessmen who comprised the bulk of the clientele at the bikini bar.
“I could have a word with them if you want, babe.” He smiled and rubbed the arch of her foot hard. “You know, just a quiet word. Scare them a little. Just enough that they leave you alone.”
Marisa looked at him suspiciously over the top of her beer bottle. “No,” she said. “You’re going to get yourself into trouble.” She took a swig from her bottle, sighing with relish after she swallowed.
“Hey,” he put up his hands and put on an innocent face, “just a quiet word. Nothing illegal, I swear. And just a couple of the worst offenders, okay?”
“Nothing illegal,” she warned him with a scowl, but then it melted into a smile. “Thanks, hun. You’re the best. I love you.”
“Love you too,” he replied as he started to massage her feet again. But he was already thinking of how much money he was going to make. That morning he had already collected four thousand dollars for handing in two of his former best friends to the IDRC, under the infected persons delivery reward scheme.
That had not been the original plan of course. The night before, Nick had persuaded Qureshi and Anthony to accompany him on yet another of his crazy escapades. He had received a tip-off that a shut-down ice cream parlor still had the owner locked inside, and that she was a zombie. Everyone knew about the two thousand-dollar bounties, so their plan was to go grab an easy score, and then go and blow the money at a strip joint.