Dearly, Beloved (4 page)

“Commander Norton says T-30 to additional men!” Ben Maza, Cheshire-faced and ashen, told me from my left. “His unit should’ve been relieved by now, but the troops were diverted to Dahlia for some reason. Must be more protestors there.”

“At least we know they went somewhere useful,” Tom griped. “I swear the Morgue makes up half the entries in the
New London Times
crime column.”

Another zombie, Franco Neale, laughed. “The army made an intelligent decision. What next? Airborne pigs as t’e heroes o’ romance chapbooks?”

Flashes went off, the reporters’ voices rising in a cacophony of new questions. Fighting the tension that was building inside me, I took a breath I couldn’t use. The Company Z guys weren’t technically my men any longer, but I still hated the fact that I had so few of them to call on. I’d lost so many over the last few months. And if today’s news proved to
be
the tipping point, the zero hour event that made living–dead relations impossible—I knew it was my responsibility to get them out. All of them.

“In your own words, what makes you different from a host?” Mr. Curious was back. I turned my head, and almost smacked my cheek into the digital voice recorder he was stretching out over the barricade. “What can you tell us about the apparent resurgence of the plague?”

“Host” was what the media had taken to calling mindless or evil zombies of the sort who’d invaded New London, the sort Company Z used to clean up after. There were many things that made myself and my friends different from them. The fact that on average we’d “awoken” far more quickly than they had, before our brains were completely starved of oxygen, our personalities and memories thus better preserved. Our ability to understand
what our condition entailed, to accept what had happened to us, and to handle our new cannibalistic urges and heightened senses. The choices we’d made. In the case of Company Z, the postmortem medical care we’d been lucky to receive.

Our self-control, although mine was starting to wear very thin.

“Look, you need to get back,” I reminded the reporter, taking a step forward. He didn’t give up ground. There was a sort of crazed light in his brown eyes; he struck me as a human-shaped mass of energy with a roaring metabolism. “For your own safety. Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

It was as if I hadn’t said a word. “Tell us about Miss Nora Dearly! Rumor has it her immunity is due to her father’s experimentation with different forms of the vaccine. Why hasn’t
that
vaccine made it out to the population at large?”

The reporter next to him leaned in and added, “Is it true Dr. Victor Dearly created the Lazarus, and that this fact is being covered up by the government? He knows the most about the illness, his daughter is the only immune individual to be discovered to date—even his government-issued underground house has gone strangely undisturbed!”

It seemed I stared at the reporters for an eternity. I could feel something dropping out under my stomach—like the dock had given way beneath me.

They were parroting Averne’s arguments. His men had created the Siege, the Morgue—
this
. This mass of scrabbling, loud, angry humanity …

It all came crashing in on me. Something snapped.

I was on them before I knew what I was doing.

The second reporter abandoned his line of questioning pretty damn quick when I punched him in the sternum, the air in his lungs escaping his throat with a strangled cough. The younger reporter, Mr. Curious, soon had a busted lip and a potential black eye, and I was dragging him over the barricade to make him a
matching set, the smell of his blood only compounding my anger, when Tom finally pulled me off. “Bram, stop it!”

“That’s a load of lies!” I roared, my throat rattling, the “scary zombie” voice taking over. “Lies that got thousands of good people killed! If either one of you repeats it to
anyone
, I will
find you
and make you regret the day you ever learned to put pen to paper!”

“I want him arrested!” the older reporter was screaming. “Now!”

“You want the cops to fight your battles for you? Don’t think you can take me?”

“Bram! Shut up and look!”

Energized by anger though I was, I did my best to listen to Tom, to stop struggling and do as he said. He yanked me around by my shirt, and I looked in the direction he guided me.

One of the living soldiers had his rifle pointed at me—trained on the only area that mattered when it came to the reanimated. My head. His voice quavered as he told me, “I don’t want to do it. I know you’re not crazy, Griswold. Calm down.”

Slowly, still shaken, I lifted my hands and tried to conquer the flood of emotions surging through me. They were right. I’d rushed out of the house to help, and here I was doing the exact opposite by giving in to my anger, acting like a lunatic. “I’m good.”

The soldier lowered his gun gratefully, and opened his mouth to say something—but then we were all driven forward, the crowd of reporters and protestors suddenly and violently surging into the barricade. The wood creaked, and the first few rows of people cried out in fear and pain as they were crushed from behind.

“What the hell?” Tom asked.

The living soldier had fallen, and I offered him my hand. He accepted it and recovered, and all three of us took two steps
toward the
Erika
—only to witness the same thing again. It was as if the crowd had spontaneously become a lurching monster, a blob attempting to shove its way forward. Before we could even swear, a nearby portion started to part, people practically climbing over one another like ants escaping a hill of sand. They were clearly attempting to get away from something—I couldn’t see what. As we stood there in confusion, the end of the barricade nearest the
Christine
broke apart with such a massive crack that I heard it over the cries of the crowd, relieving the pressure. Reporters and protestors started to flee en masse down the dock, away from the ships, trampling over the injured.

A beat later an old man with an anti-zombie sign in his hand staggered into the widening gap. He was nearly missing one of his cheeks, the flesh torn down to the bone and flapping loosely over his jaw, his upper teeth exposed. All of us stared at him in silent horror, almost in denial, as the shrieking crowd flowed around him.

“Zombies attacking!”
Commander Norton yelled.
“Prepare to engage!”

Fear solidified my riled emotions, separated them like fat on water. I had no idea what this was, but I knew it wasn’t good. “Coalhouse, Tom, assist at the evacuation point. Franco, Ben, we need a fallback line closer to the
Christine
.” I wasn’t their captain any longer, but apparently that fact meant little when it came down to it—the others hurried off, none of them questioning me. Facing the living soldier, I told him, “Find Norton. Tell him to concentrate on the
Erika
. Protect the researchers.” Shaky as he appeared, he too raced away.

With them taken care of, I tried to think in terms of priorities. That’s all I could do. Whatever was happening, I had to stop it from turning into a complete train wreck.

“You have to move!” I bellowed at the crowd. Nearby reporters screamed and tried to scatter, but couldn’t get far. Although
the area was emptying out, it was starting to slow due to confusion and the sheer number of bodies involved. A few people didn’t even attempt to run, rooted to the spot by fear.

Knowing how little time we had, I literally took matters into my own hands. Catching a couple of catatonic reporters by their jackets, I dragged them under the barricade and pushed them toward the water. “Go! Get off the dock and move farther down-shore! Swim if you have to!”

Realizing that I’d just handed them a map out of this mess, the reporters finally listened to
something
I said, slipping around the barricade and leaping into the ocean like a herd of lemmings. Cameras, recorders, and digital diaries were abandoned. As the crowd thinned I was finally able to see past it, to make out the source of the threat. What I saw made my dead stomach attempt to twist.

A huge, disorganized column of dead people appeared to be fighting its way toward us. Men, women—children. They hadn’t yet reached the barricade, but a few of them were savaging the living reporters and protestors still blocking their path. I saw teeth sinking into skin, nails tearing through clothing. Blood foaming, spurting. Flesh stretching like hot rubber. A thousand memories flooded my brain, and yet I couldn’t have grasped on to a single one of them if I tried. It was the riot, all over again. It was the horrors of war, of the Siege, all over again.

But that wasn’t the only thing that hit me.

Hot on their tail was a mob of murderous-looking living people—armed living people. As I watched, one of them caught a dead lady by her hair and pulled her to the ground, cracking a steel pipe across her skull.

The zombies were being chased. Hunted.

The soldiers saw it, too. Norton’s voice rose above the screams of pain and fear. “Living civilians mixed in with the dead! Keep steady, gentlemen!”

I started to move, only to find Mr. Curious was still standing next to me, his hand over his bloody mouth. “I can’t swim,” he said, before I could order him into the water. He took a trembling breath, slung his camera cord over his neck, and unhooked a cane from his belt. “But I … I know bartitsu!”

“That’s nice,” I told him. “They know biting.”

Mr. Curious looked up at me helplessly, his face white. Shoving him in the direction of the
Christine
, I said, “Make yourself useful! Get belowdecks and start yelling at anyone who’ll listen—we need to lift the gangplank once everyone’s on board!”

To his credit, the young man immediately did as I said, leaving me to run in the opposite direction. My body felt heavy and hollow at the same time, and I was convinced that I would have no choice but to start shooting, myself—to count the biters as hosts. That idea didn’t sit well. In theory, with the vaccine, the dead were no longer infectious. If I shot these particular zombies, I might as well shoot the people chasing them. Hell, the zombie who’d indirectly caused all this—the newfangled biter—had been arrested, not blown away. Besides, the crowd was thick with the living. I could hear the army men relaying the same warning about collateral damage, accompanied by an order to hold fire.

That gave me hope. I ran faster.

As I got closer to the back of the crowd, Tom soon joining me, it became apparent that the great majority of the invading zombies were terrified, and weren’t lashing out save to clear a path or escape their attackers. For their sakes, I knew what we had to do. If bullets started flying, it’d put us right in the thick of it, but it was the only way. “Norton!” I yelled.

I found him near the
Erika
’s dock. He turned to look at me, unmistakable fear in his eyes. “You do
not
give my men orders, Griswold!” Turning to a subordinate, he said, “Get a line going. Prepare to target the zombies and shoot to kill. All of them.”

“No! There are living people chasing those zombies. They’re trapped, that’s why they’re fighting back!”

“As a living man, let me make it abundantly clear to you how little of a
crap
I give about zombie motivations!” Norton was swiftly turning red. “Who knows what they did in the city that started this!”

No. I couldn’t let this happen. Leaning into his face, I said, “You do this, zombies citywide might retaliate. We haven’t forgotten that the army turned on us at the last minute in December. Decided all zombies, good and bad, were going to die. Remember that?”

Commander Norton said nothing. I had my in.

“We can handle this. Get your men, get the living to this dock. Leave the dead to us. There are
kids
out there!”

“Griswold—”

“With all due respect, sir, this is what we were
trained
to do!”

It took him a second, but in the end he nodded. “My men! Aid the living!”

That left us to our half. “Time to punch some skulls,” I yelled at Tom. “We need them down, not dead!”

The squat tank of a zombie cracked his knuckles. “I love this part.”

Pulling my gun’s strap over my shoulder, I threw myself into the crowd, seeking out the violent dead. It was easy enough to home in on them—I just let myself give in again. Let the rage wash over me. Soon the tang of fresh blood was all I could smell, growls and screams all I could hear—and it was those signs I followed to their source. One by one Tom and I pulled the attacking zombies off their targets and punched or kicked them to unconsciousness before tossing their bodies to the dock. At one point Tom used his rifle like a cricket bat, swinging the stock viciously upward to connect with the base of a zombie’s skull. The
injured living and the frightened dead we directed to the
Christine
, where I could see Franco, Ben, and Coalhouse working to receive them, helping them to dodge the attacks and ushering them on board the ship.

Distantly I heard Commander Norton ordering his men to prepare to intercept the living mob. As I grabbed my last biter, a wild-eyed young woman in a ragged dress, out of the corner of my eye I saw the red-coats moving to secure the barricade. The girl fought me tooth and nail, screaming like a rabbit in a snare, forcing me to risk my own hide by head-butting her into submission. She went quiet, knocked out, and fell with a strange sort of grace to the dock when I dropped her.

In one of those weird, slow-motion moments that seems to attend times of disaster, I found myself thinking that the people we were fighting were almost boring to behold. Not enemy soldiers. Not monsters. It hadn’t been hunger that’d driven the woman I just incapacitated, like the ones we’d always taken down in the wild, in the tiny villages—cleaning up after the Laz so the living didn’t have to come into contact with it. Instead, she’d been the prey.

She had every reason to get mad, to strike back.

Threat dispatched, I slowly returned to myself and looked up. The living mob was nearly upon us, and they weren’t slowing. I knew we couldn’t take them on. We couldn’t let the situation escalate to that level. Let their fellow living deal with them.