Death After Life: A Zombie Apocalypse Thriller (17 page)

Where they were lucky was Voskuil’s misspent youth. He had an old BMW cycle in his teens. Of course, his mother made him sell it when, at 20, his best friend Joel Fishman was killed on a Ducati.

That was one of the reasons Voskuil got into medicine. To save people like Joel. Of course, his path in life had taken some significant detours since then. Voskuil liked to think that if it weren’t for the whole zombie apocalypse thing, he would be a real humanitarian.
 

Oh well.

The Corvette lost it in the turn but the Mustang pivoted smoothly through without losing much speed. The Vette rattled into a fire hydrant, jumped the curb and went three-sixty in the front yard of a high school, tearing doughnuts in the sod.

Voskuil noted this in the side mirror with satisfaction. Unfortunately, when the car stopped, it was facing the right direction. The cop behind the wheel just put his foot down and they sped forward again.

Voskuil cursed silently and focused on the street ahead. He didn’t know where he was going and braked, trying to conjure a city map in his head. He couldn’t focus; driving at this speed required too much concentration. He glanced down at the bike, realizing it probably had an onboard GPS.
 

In that moment, the Interceptor pulled up alongside.

“Get in the car!” Nic yelled out the window.

Voskuil, uncertain, did not throttle down. He saw the Corvette gaining in his side mirror. A host of other flashing lights were many blocks back, for now, but growing larger.

The Interceptor dogged him but carefully kept a discreet distance. Voskuil knew he had Waters, so long as he had Lena. He slowed, looking for a good place to pull over. The Corvette whipped into range and an armored trooper leaned out the window with a weapon aimed at them.

“Bastard!” Voskuil screamed, and gunned it again. The cop in the Corvette opened fire.

#

Winter was stunned by what happened next. Nic cried out and rammed the Corvette in the rear left side, crumpling the bumper into the wheel-well. The crippled Corvette spun out, tire locked.

Contrary to the movies, at speed it took very little contact to stop another car dead in its tracks.

Winter turned to watch the Corvette flip three times in rapid succession. It was only halted when it slammed into a bus shelter and plowed the entire structure beneath its body.

“Damn Nic,” Winter said. “Those guys… They might be…”

“Fuck them,” Nic spat. “That’s not procedure. They knew he had a hostage. That was cold blooded.”

Winter wasn’t sure the cops knew Elena was a hostage, and he thought the firing officer might have been trying to disable the bike, but he didn’t want to argue the point. Not right now, anyway.

Nic followed Voskuil down the block. Winter’s second thoughts were temporarily banished by a glance in the rearview. Those distant lights had become a fleet of official cars, sirens howling like condemned souls. There was only one way out. Forward.

#

Voskuil saw the flotilla of cherry-tops gaining and simply accelerated again, hoping to somehow lose their pursuers. It was, after all, his only hope.

There would be no jail time here. No court process. Just a simple test. Which he would fail. He’d tested himself when he got home from the theater, but that was a formality. He had it. This was a textbook case, a no-brainer. In the eyes of the law, his sentence was summary euthanasia the moment that junkie’s teeth drew blood.

Voskuil vowed, if he somehow survived this, to never use the e-word again. Even if he lived to be 100.

It was then that the roadblock appeared before them. Ad hoc, ill-equipped, but effective. Two cars parked at a diagonal, headlights almost touching. Four armed cops positioned in firing angles at either bumper.

More than enough to stop two people on a motorcycle.

Braking hard, Voskuil desperately sought a sliver of proverbial daylight between the cars and the curbs. There was barely a foot on either side. He would have to jump the curb…

Voskuil had never tried such a stunt with his own bike, let alone with a curb this high. And certainly not with a passenger. No way.
 

But today he was going for it.

Voskuil gave the bike some gas and angled for the left curb. Meanwhile, the police opened fire.

Bullets seared the air around them. Voskuil leaned into the handlebars and focused on the rapidly approaching curb. It was upon them in an instant.
 

“UP!” he screamed, left to hope Gladden had common sense and quick reflexes. She did — their asses left the saddle at roughly the same time, weight pulling up the front wheel, and the bike hopped the curb. The tires landed on sidewalk and they were past the roadblock in an instant.

But Voskuil instinctively braked, facing an array of obstacles: a mailbox, parking meters, a café table.
 

The cops behind them kept shooting. A bullet grazed the Honda’s front tire, missing Voskuil’s hip by inches.
 

Voskuil played the handgrips like a musical instrument and managed to keep the bike from jack-knifing. It was a brilliant display of riding, inspired by sheer, animal desire for flight. They lost more speed, however.

The Interceptor suddenly spun ahead of them, fishtailing. One of the cars must have moved to let their fellow government officials through.

Voskuil was forced to stop at last. He cut into a controlled slide only yards away from Waters’ car.
 

“GO!” He shoved Lena toward it, ditching the bike on its side. Together they scrambled for the Mustang.
So close…
 

Focused on the passenger doorhandle, Voskuil felt a surge of optimism. Two steps, one quick move and they’d be in the car with badass Nic on their side. She’d know where the closest freeway ramp was.
 

He’d made it.
 

Gunfire erupted behind them.

Against his will, Voskuil went from hopeful to blank in an instant. The end he had been desperately, cunningly avoiding had come, and come abruptly.
 

Voskuil never knew that it was a military-issue armor-piercing round that passed through the back of his skull and cleanly out the front.

Lena felt Voskuil reflexively seize her arm for support, and looked back to see him tottering along with a dazed expression. There was a large flapping wound in his forehead. It pulsed blood in rivulets down either side of his nose.

Already dead, Voskuil sprawled face-first on the pavement. The impact sent his front teeth rattling over the street.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

BON VOYAGE

IF IT WAS possible, things seemed to happen even more quickly after that. Six patrol cars skidded to a halt in a loose ring around Voskuil’s body, the roadblockers and other pursuers.

Nic ushered Lena to the seat in the rear of the Interceptor Voskuil thought, seconds before, that he would be occupying. She wiped the infected man’s blood and brain matter off Lena’s face with her uniform sleeve.
 

“You need to spit?” Nic asked. Lena numbly shook her head. She was pretty sure nothing had gotten in her mouth.

Obviously, there was a threat of contagion if Lena ingested any of Voskuil’s infected blood. Though the virus was fully airborne and every person on Earth was exposed to it daily, that concentration was insufficient to thwart the human immune system. Only the recently dead, their bodies’ defenses in full shutdown, could be made hosts without a larger, more direct dose.
 

For the living, the threat came from a break in the skin, usually caused by a bite or scratch from a v-carrier. This was enough to directly introduce concentrated pathogens into the bloodstream. Once that happened, the virus inevitably chipped away the white blood-cell count and other indicators of a healthy immune system. There was some variance, of course, in the duration of individual declines. A healthy, fit person might survive the full 72 hours that was known to be possible. But the mortality rate with this plague was 100%.

If you were v-positive, you were as good as dead.

Winter prepared the tiny testing syringe. Lena stared at it in quiet dread. She glanced at her arm. Small half-moons, the shape of Voskuil’s fingernails, marred her pale skin. A wan trickle of blood seeped from one of them. Just a drop or two, really. The wound wouldn’t even require a Band-Aid.

That stupid, selfish son of a bitch.

She gazed at Winter with trepidation as he approached her with the needle.

“Won’t hurt a bit,” he said. “Just a quick pinprick and it’s over.”

She nodded. He seemed confident she was clean. Perhaps her blood and Voskuil’s hadn’t commingled….

What Lena didn’t know was that Winter was instinctively carrying out his well-drilled protocol. It was standard practice to take a reassuring attitude with citizens prior to testing. After all, who would willingly submit to a test that, if failed, meant the officer was to immediately shoot you? The properly trained officer’s demeanor suggested the v-test was just a formality. It was good psychology, and Winter knew firsthand that it worked.

Taking the blood sample, Winter listened surreptitiously as Nic intercepted the other officers before they could reach Lena.

“Nice shooting,” she said. Casual.

“Yeah, I think it was mine,” one of the men said, a wiry SPD veteran Winter believed was named Garcia. They’d dealt with him before, on a tenement sweep. Some residents were refusing v-tests, brandishing arms. Virus Control and Seattle Police raided the building, killed some agitators and submitted the rest to testing. None of them were infected. People were just paranoid.

“No it wasn’t, I got him,” another local cop, a stocky Filipino woman said with a faint smile. “I’m firing armor-piercers. You saw that exit wound.”

“So, what’s her story?” Garcia asked, angling his head toward Lena. Winter put the sample in the self-loading tray. Only 15 seconds to wait now.

“She says they worked together. He was stalking her, she caught him, and the abduction occurred at the workplace,” Nic said, convincingly. Winter was impressed. She really would make a good poker player.

The test finished and Winter looked at the display. A red light was flashing silently. No need to alarm the person being tested. That only made things harder for everyone. The display said it all, though.

“SAMPLE V-POSITIVE: EUTHANIZE VICTIM NOW.”

A reminder to do what the law mandated. Winter nodded, processing this information on some level and denying it on another.

Suddenly, gunshots rang out, just a few blocks away. Winter glanced up, saw the police visibly stiffen. He knew it had to be the officers in the Corvette being euthanized. It didn’t seem as though anyone knew that Nic was responsible for their deaths.
 

Except for Nic, Lena and Winter.

“Those patrol guys didn’t make it,” another cop said. “Damn.”

“It looked pretty bad,” Garcia noted. “Son of a bitch! Wish we could kill him twice.”

“We could have, if she’d hit him in the chest,” one of the others deadpanned. The Asian officer chuckled in gallows humor.
 

Local police generally gave Virus Control a wide berth. It was working in Winter’s favor right now. If one of them strolled over and saw that readout…
 

He didn’t know what he would do.

Nonetheless, Winter quickly drew a blood sample from his own arm and ran the test. Even in the grips of despair, his instinct was to sustain hope. They could get to Atlanta. If there WAS a cure… There was hope.

Winter beckoned Nic over. It was a subtle flick of his hand and a nod, but it told her the news was very, very bad. Which was his intention.

Nic walked as though she didn’t feel her feet touching the pavement. Great poker player or not, to Winter’s eye she appeared visibly unsteady. Garcia didn’t seem to notice, though. Seattle P.D. went back to their cars, presumably to file their reports and summon a meatwagon.

Nic saw that the terminal was flashing green and a floodwater of relief washed through her entire body before Winter could get her attention. He actually had to touch her arm to end this terribly cruel moment of false joy. Her head snapped to him and she saw the dot of blood on his arm. She met his gaze for a look it killed him to give her.
 

Nic crumpled visibly, a jolt of horror making her gag. But all this fluttered through her body in a second or two. She turned and stared impassively over the car roof and into the night sky.

After a moment or two she suddenly looked intently at Winter, gauging his next move. Resigned to the worst.

He felt wounded by that. “I follow your play,” he whispered. “Just do what you’re gonna do.”

She nodded with the tiniest of smiles.
 

Frank Quarles’ voice made Winter turn and his stomach tighten with unease. “You dummies are up awfully early.”

What the hell was he doing here?!
 

“So are you,” Winter said. It was the best he could do, in the face of this nightmare situation. Perhaps sensing the question, Quarles volunteered an answer. “I was doing my morning calisthenics when I heard the scanner. Recognized Lena’s name, came right out. She okay?”

“Yeah, not a scratch on her,” Nic said. “Thank God.”

“That’s a relief,” Quarles said, but even then, there was a note of doubt in his voice. As if his mind had already leaped from point A to point B on the way over here. Which told Winter they were in a lot of trouble.

“Yeah, I’ll just drive her over to Harborview, get her cleared to go home,” Nic said, turning back toward the car. She gave Winter a warning glance. Facing Quarles, he didn’t react but held her gaze long enough to tell her he’d received the message.
Yep. Not good.

“But she’s clean, right? Thank God for that, at least….” Quarles said, leading them. Suspicious for sure. “I know if she wasn’t, you’d do what needed to be done.”

Winter’s hand was instinctively poised to go for his weapon. He casually walked around the front of their cruiser, toward the passenger seat…