Death After Life: A Zombie Apocalypse Thriller (2 page)

“Give me your arm,” Felton said, with the bedside manner of an infirmary doctor at Chino. Tina thrust it out. Felton looked at her forearm gingerly, reluctant to touch her. At last he carefully drew her blood with one of those new, nearly instantaneous syringes the government had issued to its various agencies.

He handed it back to the first guy — “Isley,” his badge said — and glanced up at her imprisoned legs.
 

“Please,” Tina said, fear wrapping itself around her body like a coat of ice (or was it the blood loss? She was growing light-headed). “I’m pregnant!”

Felton shook his head, as if denying the validity of the statement. He hadn’t looked her in the eye. Not even once.

Isley trotted back. “She’s clean.”

Felton stared into space, the expression of a man lucidly weighing options in his mind. “What’s the ETA on the truck?”

“They got a house fire in Renton. We’re waiting on 54 to finish up on 3
rd
and Stewart.”

Felton nodded at this new piece of information. He grabbed Tina’s wrist and clinically took her pulse.

“I can make it,” Tina pleaded, even as she knew she must be growing pale, her dripping blood a steady drumbeat on the upside-down roof of the car. She hadn’t felt anything in her womb for such a long time….

“Pulse is weak. I’m… I’m going to diagnose as critical.”

Isley flinched, knowing what that meant. Tina panicked, clutching at Felton’s arm. He withdrew from the car as if burned.

“Let the record show that at, uh 9:51 p.m…. The patient, the victim, was humanely euthanized.”

Tina reached desperately for him, unable to accept that everything she’d survived so far would come to this. “NO! Please, I’m
pregnant
, for God’s sake! You can’t… Let’s wait for the truck, I can—”
 

Felton pointed a gun at her. Tina threw her arms up protectively, shielding her head. “Oh, God, no….”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and squeezed the trigger three times in rapid succession. The first shot went through Tina’s elbow and into the seat but the second two bullets passed through her brain.
 

Tina went slack, arms dangling from her seat. Her fingers nearly brushed the purse she’d been trying to reach. But not quite.

Isley looked stunned, as if he didn’t think his partner would actually go through with it.

“Jesus Christ! You killed her!”

“No shit.” Felton drew back, holstered his sidearm. He was shaken but relieved to have gotten that over with. “Better change that call to a meatwagon.”

Felton looked at Tina’s lifeless face and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

C
HAPTER
T
WO

WHATEVER GETS YOU THROUGH THE NIGHT

THE STREETS OF Seattle seemed to soak up an endless amount of rain. Whatever the heavens threw at those asphalt thoroughfares and concrete parking lots, they just drank it up. There was one thing the city hadn’t lost since the virus hit town: good drainage.

Winter Masakawa considered telling his partner this, but it was time to order espresso.

“Gimme a white chocolate mocha, the biggest size you got,” he said, leaning from the passenger seat to address the guy in the “Espresso Yourself” drive-thru window. In doing so, Winter was acutely aware of his proximity to the woman behind the wheel of their police Interceptor.
 

She smelled faintly of lilac soap and shampoo, her breath just tickling his neck when he leaned over her lap. The heat of her body was also subtly detectible, or at least it seemed so to Winter.
 

But, of course, he was in love with her.

“Decaf nonfat latte, medium,” Nicolette Waters ordered. Her slightly rough, businesslike voice was about an octave lower than the average girl’s. He loved listening to her talk because she spoke precisely but without calculation, and in pleasantly resonant tones. Based on a couple of epic karaoke nights he knew for a fact her singing voice was above average, even if she couldn’t carry a tune to save her life.

“Been too quiet lately,” Winter remarked. “I’m getting fat.”

“You were always fat.”

“Ha ha. Anyway, like I was saying… This guy was a park ranger, so he was always away from his family for weeks at a time. Well, something happened to him up in the Canadian Rockies — who knows, point is he buys it. One night, I wanna say about six weeks later — guess who finds his way back to his own front door? Like a lost dog.”

“No way.”

“This is absolutely true. Guy must have crossed 50 miles of rough terrain on foot, but something led him home.”

“I call bullshit. Let’s have the punchline.”

Winter smiled, enjoying the way the spark of interest lit up her eyes. Nic’s peepers were a deep walnut brown, nothing special maybe, but the kind of eyes that really seemed to change to suit the emotions at play behind them.
Expressive
. That was the word.

Which was not to discount the fact that, again, Winter Masakawa was in love with his partner.

“No punchline. I told you, this a true story. Mr. Park Ranger’s eight-year-old son dusted him trying to crawl through the cat-door.”

Nic laughed so hard it bounced her long, tight braids. “No punch line, my ass.”
 

Winter looked at her with mock seriousness. “Would I make up something like that?”

They’d gotten their coffee and were parked on the street when the dispatcher’s voice crackled over the digital receiver. A waving Abominable Snowman figurine was mounted on the dash beside it.
 

It was garbled (department equipment was gradually going to seed, Winter had noticed) and Nic fooled around with the tuner. She picked up the mic. “10-1, receiving poorly.”

Winter sipped his drink, waiting for the caffeine to lift him from his afternoon doldrums. “I’ll receive a lot better after my mocha.”

The static-distorted voice patiently repeated its message. Winter thought he could hear “10-92.” He knew that code.

Nic must have found a better frequency because Dispatch’s suddenly clear voice confirmed Winter’s suspicions.

“All units, all units, 10-92 in progress in the U-District. 10-92 in progress, U-District.”

Winter groaned. “Not another riot.” He lolled back on his head-rest, closing his eyes.

Prompted by headquarters, the heads-up display offered turn-by-turn directions. They didn’t need it.
 

The Interceptor reversed, light bar flaring green and yellow. The siren spit a few notes and a Jeep dawdling in their lane moved aside to let them U-turn. The sleek Mustang leapt forward as if jet-propelled, streaking northward.

Winter checked the load on his department-issue Heckler & Koch submachine gun. Light and short-barreled, the semi-automatic made a fine weapon for virus control because most encounters were at short range. You needed stopping power to keep a relentlessly advancing feeder at bay until you could hit him in the head.

Securing the magazine, Winter realized he had no idea how many feeders he’d taken down with this very H&K. More than a few. He’d been a Seattle beat cop for almost a year when the bug hit. After a few chaotic weeks he signed up with the Department of Virus Control, on the very day it was inaugurated. He was green, then. Now, in Year Three A.V. (“After Virus”) he was starting to forget what being a cop used to be like.

Virus Control didn’t do domestic disturbance calls, bust corner crack peddlers or issue speeding tickets. Winter likened his gig to a military police posting in an occupied country — every neighborhood was unsecured, every civilian was a potential threat and every patrol could be your last. His cousin Hideo did two tours in Afghanistan and had confirmed that analogy.

“Awful quiet over there,” Nic commented, looking over with that hint of playfulness she reserved for him. Or so he liked to think.

“Just getting my game face on.”

“Your face always looks like that.”

“You calling me an inscrutable Asian?”

“I’m calling you a better poker player than a cop.”

Winter smiled. “That why you refuse to join our game, or are you afraid we’ll play strip?”

“I got nothing to be afraid of,” Nic bantered back with a look he found so incalculably sexy he wondered how long this partnership could last. It was killing him and keeping him going at the same time.

#

Evan Pollard parked the truck beside the burnt-out façade of a Korean grocery, long-closed, and the news crew cautiously disembarked with their equipment. Jeanne, Evan and the two sound guys.
 

“Still hot for hard news?” Evan quipped, making Jeanne scowl as she smoothed out the wrinkles in her “on-air” blazer. “It’s all hard news now,” Jeanne snapped. “We’re at war, dumbass.”

She looked out over the ruins of the U-District and discordantly remembered a live remote she’d done here about a year before the virus changed everything. It was a puff piece about a sculptor who’d left a giant fiberglass Octopus on the sidewalk in the middle of the night. Guerilla art, someone’s commentary on multinational corporations.
 

If there was one nice thing you could say about the virus, it was that it had pretty much sounded the death knell of the puff piece. Then again, nobody gave a shit about local Emmys anymore, either.

Jeanne confidently led the crew into the rubble. She was wearing hiking boots — the “on-air” shoes (pumps) were in her purse.

The column of protesters marched past, noisy as hell and waving their signs and banners like there was no tomorrow. Which, of course, was always possible, for anyone outside of a Ft. Knox style bunker in the mountains.

“Come on, boys,” Jeanne said, gathering her “on-air” persona with a lungful of air. “An Emmy for everyone.”

Just for old time’s sake.

#

When Amy Cooley saw the KOMO Channel 4 News van pull up outside the shuttered grocery, she felt a surge of vindication at flouting her parents’ warnings and joining the protest march. They’d said survival was the best way to make your voice heard, which didn’t make much sense any way you cut it, but she understood their trepidation. This neighborhood had been hit hard when the virus swept through the city.
 

In those first frantic weeks, like everywhere else, Seattle’s inhabitants turned on each other in a wild, uncomprehending tumult. People weren’t as well armed then, of course, but in the initial panic (mostly unchecked by police) violence bloomed like a hothouse flower. The infected ran rampant in close quarters, finding victims behind every door. Residents already paranoid about each other showed little compassion or restraint when confronted with a haggard neighbor who may already be “one of them.”

Ultimately the National Guard fought one of the biggest battles of the Seattle campaign among the student residences and junkie flophouses. The low-rent housing burned or was razed and many of the bodies were dumped in a mass grave behind the Episcopalian church on Falkirk Ave.

Since then, the U-District had been largely abandoned, despite city government’s assurances that it had been fully pacified. This was a fitting place to protest the government’s anti-plague policies, for it represented the failure of that government to protect those who most needed it. Over four thousand casualties were suffered in the U-District area during the initial outbreak, and a full 1200 were children. Three days before the organizers had unspooled these facts with grim intonations at the Student Union, addressing the Social Action Club.
 

One look over at the handsome Shea McDonald was enough to put Amy’s name on the sign-up list. He’d also been enough to lure her to the club in the first place, though the burden of being a freshman with a scholarship to maintain already weighed heavily on her. In point of fact, a look at Shea McDonald was probably enough to lead her straight up to the gates of hell.

And so Amy found herself within the ranks of sign-waving students, activists and disenfranchised poor, despite the fact that the scary old tenements and collapsed houses were doing much to erode what courage Amy had brought with her. The knowledge that Shea McDonald was only a few steps away brought only scant comfort now.

Watching the news crew approach, Amy hoped they would interview her. A few cogent words, perhaps a poignant entreaty to the television audience, might go a long way to getting the impossibly attractive junior to ask her out.
 

She was blonde, which the guys seemed to like, and waif thin (though the word “cow” often came to mind when she looked in the mirror), but she wouldn’t describe herself as vivacious and self-possessed, qualities the other “political” girls seemed to have in spades.

Of course, they weren’t as pretty as Amy. Funny how that worked out.

The news crew fell in step with the procession about 50 people behind Amy, dashing (at least for the moment) her hopes of impressing Shea with quality camera time. While her eyes were on the reporter, she tripped over a half-buried newspaper box and nearly fell face first into a carpet of broken glass.

Shea was instantly there to help her up, demeanor concerned and nonjudgmental, but Amy turned bright red just the same.

“Thanks,” she said, and he smiled easily before turning to keep going.

#

When the skinny white girl took the spill nearby, Jerome Green marveled again at what a dumb idea all this was. Somebody was bound to get hurt, and Jerome was determined that it wouldn’t be him. He kept close to Andre and Jimmy, hoping the older guys knew what they were doing. It was their lark, this impromptu social activism, and Jerome took their boasts of “we’ll bust up some pigs” for the empty bravado it was. Nobody was happy with the way shit went down these days, but the cops had dispensed with nightsticks and pepper spray in favor of “shoot first, file the report later.” You had to be a serious banger in a serious crew to fuck with them, and Jerome’s neighbors, tough as they might be, weren’t gonna win many “o.g.” challenges anytime soon.
 

Jerome stuck his hands in the pockets of his baggy Seahawks jacket and trudged on, watching the cute ass of the girl in front of him. He figured there were several hundred people out here already. Apparently their plan was to hike through the ruins and conclude downtown, where they would address City Hall from the street until arrested or dispersed.