Death After Life: A Zombie Apocalypse Thriller (3 page)

The TV reporter — Jerome had seen her glib reportage before, but couldn’t remember her name — was hustling toward the marchers. Sure would be cool to get on the news. He tried to think of something smooth to say for the camera, but nothing sprang to mind.

From a few blocks away, the wind carried an all-too familiar artificial wail to Jerome’s ears. Sirens.

“Ah yeah, time to scrap,” Andre said, cocking a head toward the sound of trouble, growing louder all the time. Jerome caught Jimmy’s eye, and saw some of his own anxiety reflected there.
 

The rubber bullets were gathering dust in a storeroom somewhere. Nowadays, all rounds were live.

#

Wendell Atkins awakened blearily to the sound of marching feet, chants, and approaching sirens. He somehow equated this with the possibility of a hot meal, as he now looked favorably on any break from the isolation and monotony of life in the ruins.
 

Wendell had sought refuge in the restricted neighborhood when he was chased out of a Safeway by a machine-gun toting assistant manager, whose reaction to a swiped deli sandwich was to threaten murder. The trigger-happy asshole scared Wendell so much he’d just kept running until there was no one around to shoot him.

Finding himself in a quiet, almost peaceful valley of uninhabited buildings, once chaotic perhaps but no longer torn by the strife had emptied them, Wendell quickly stopped expecting a feeder to grab his arm as he passed a hole in a wall.
 

He spent the night in a thoroughly looted liquor store. When morning came and he’d heard not a single voice or car engine, let alone been menaced by murderous Safeway clerks, Wendell realized he may have found a peaceful refuge. The song of birds confirmed his sentiment, as if signaling nature’s return to a place surrendered by humanity. He felt much safer in this abandoned place than in the teeming city.

Sleeping in the litter of empty bottles and torn-up packaging, Wendell was as content as he’d been since the hospital turned him out in September. The shelters he’d been to were mean, squalid places, packed with paranoid eyes and violent hands.
 

It was two days in the liquor store before he really got hungry again, but it hit him with a vengeance. Even his emaciated 120-pound frame required some sustenance beyond the rainwater he collected in a bucket outside the store. Foraging in the ruins had brought him glimpses of other squatters (Wendell wondered if he looked as filthy and desperate as they did) but precious little food. Now it had been five days since he’d eaten more than two stale Twinkies and a dead rat (how long it had been dead, he steadfastly refused to wonder).
 

Famished, every step a test of strength, Wendell tottered toward the line of demonstrators with only one thought in his energy-deprived brain. Hope. Surely one of these bleeding hearts would give him food, money, something that would make the ache in his empty belly go away.

Staggering through the archway formed by a blasted-out window in the façade of what was once a 99 Cent Store, Wendell tried hoarsely to find his long-unused voice.

#

As she caught up with her choice for the first interview, Jeanne made sure her cameraman was following along — these days crews were used to shooting on the move. Viewers didn’t expect well-choreographed field reporting. Everyone had come to expect an element of chaos in their lives.

She stuck a microphone in the face of an angry young man holding one end of a banner that shouted, “MEDICARE WAS NOT AN OPTIONAL PROGRAM!” The guy looked like an organizer type; he wore a Che Gueverra T-shirt and a jean jacket covered with political buttons and patches.

“The right to assemble in protest has been suspended by executive order,” Jeanne said, throwing a look into Evan’s lens, “Why are you risking arrest?”

“These neighborhoods are a symbol of neglect,” the protester replied. His breath smelled distinctly of onions. “They represent the low priority our government gives its constituents who aren’t moneyed influences. In a time of crisis, you see who’s really important. In this country, it’s only the rich.”

The police sirens drew near. The protesters exchanged nervous glances, quickening their step. There was no telling, these days, what the response to civil disobedience might be.

A bold dissident started a chant. “USA, USA. Fascist law is here to stay!”

Reluctantly at first, the others took up the mantra. Soon they were bellowing it in unison.

A wall of police in riot gear cautiously approached, faces masked by their black helmets. Each held a shield in one hand and a submachine gun in the other. No billy-clubs today.

A captain shouted into his bullhorn, “This is the Seattle Municipal Defense Bureau! You are ordered to disperse immediately!”

The protesters ignored his order, tenaciously marching toward downtown. But the intensity of their chant flagged, a few stumbling as their eyes spent more time on the riot cops than the treacherous footing.

Jeanne approached the police captain. “These people are unarmed. What’s your response going to be if they disobey your command?”

The grizzled career cop gave her the kind of look inspired by an encounter with the criminally insane. “This isn’t a University sit-in. Disorderly mob activity is a threat to public safety.”

“Answer the question, Captain. What will be your response if these protesters fail to disperse?”

The captain gave her a steely-eyed glare. His eyes flicked to the camera in his face.
 

“We have the situation under control.”

#

Wendell half-ran, half crawled the last hundred yards of alley between him and the clean, well-fed young people. He knew somewhere in his gut that if it took more than 50 more steps, he wasn’t going to make it. He would collapse, and never get back up.
 

Not alive, anyway.

The first person he saw stood out like a beacon in the crowd. The young girl was angelic — a slender blonde with a sweet, infinitely gentle face….
 

#

Amy turned her head and he was just
there
. An emaciated figure, skeletal really, with big glassy eyes and a filthy hand that reached unsteadily for her. He must have tottered from the alley because suddenly here he was, mouth working like a gasping fish.
 

She screamed, because this apparition was about to grab her arm. Shea whirled, saw the man, and pulled a small silver .38 revolver from his coat.

In the next split-second Amy recognized that the man faltered, a uniquely human reaction to a firearm pointed at him. He was alive. She started to open her mouth, though she had no idea exactly how she would articulate what she needed to...

There wasn’t enough time. Shea pulled the trigger. The man dropped, a black hole fissuring blood from his temple. Dead. For good, at least.

Amy stepped forward, words starting to form on her lips. A second bark of gunfire, more distant, and Shea himself was sliding along a toppled wall with a stricken expression.
 

Mercifully, Amy never registered that the top of Shea’s head had been roughly sheared off by police bullets. Less than a second later, her own brain was quieted forever by a bullet’s deadly passage.

#

Jerome sensed the white girl’s shooting more than witnessed it — he was tracking the gunfire’s sudden reports while hustling over treacherous terrain that demanded his attention — but he caught her crumpling to the ground and quickly put two and two together. The police had opened fire on the crowd, and that meant they would keep shooting until there were no potential threats left. Jerome knew as well as the most hardened v-cop that anyone without a bullet-perforated brain was a potential threat.

Jerome ran headlong through the panicked crowd, everyone stumbling over rubble in their haste. All around him ankles turned, knees buckled, bodies crashed heavily to the unforgiving ground. Signs and placards were trampled underfoot.

Their bold words forgotten in the roar of discharged rounds, Andre and Jimmy darted fleetly onward without a glance back at Jerome. His step was more unsure and he fell behind. Their backs vanished behind a swirl of fleeing bodies and when the way cleared again, Jerome had lost track of them.

This was unsettling enough but things got worse when he ran right into a v-cop in black body-armor — they rebounded off each other like billiards balls. This cop’s helmet screen was transparent and Jerome got a glimpse of a man’s youthful Asian features and startled eyes.

There was a second cop beside him — a lithe female — who reflexively lifted her submachine gun to waist level.

Jerome veered right, zigzagging blindly to put the cops behind him. He plunged through the doorless threshold of a derelict building and took refuge in its shadows.

Breathing hard, Jerome picked his way through the gloom of a long-closed bank lobby. An asteroid belt of dust drifted in the rays of light filtering through breaks in the walls.
 

Running across the dark room, he sought another way out.
There.
A broken window beckoned from the other side of the building.

Jerome ran heedlessly through the debris in semi-darkness. He shot a glance over his shoulder to check for pursuers. No one yet. Passing a dark stairwell, he didn’t see the furtive shape rising up the stairs…
 

Until it was too late. A leprous green arm shot between the rails to seize his leg. Jerome screamed, loud and hard. He tore away from the claw-like hand but the bony fingers had already dug through his jeans and deeply into the muscles just above the knee — a handful of meat stayed in that vile grip.

Leg pumping out blood, Jerome half-crawled, half-ran across the debris.
 

Behind him, a hideous ghoul clambered over the rail in one uncanny, almost graceful movement. It had a green complexion, black-pit eyes and long stringy hair. The stink of well-advanced decomposition was stomach-churningly rank. This guy had been dead for awhile.

As the grotesque creature shambled toward him, Jerome found that he could put no weight on his injured leg. Wriggling desperately for the daylight, his plaintive scream gave voice to the certainty that a terrible death was only moments away.

#

Hearing the boy’s scream just instants after he disappeared into the crumbling hulk on the corner, Winter shared a grimly knowing glance with Nic. It was doubtful the boy had only tripped.

Confirmation came in a sharper, more ululating cry from within the building. A telltale sign.
 

They ventured inside at a trot, snapping halogen torches onto their gun-barrels.
 

Their high-intensity beams roved the space in quick, controlled sweeps until spotlighting the decomposing corpse marionette-walking toward the screaming, crying teen.

In tandem they lifted their rifle-stocks to their shoulders and in a single burst, cut down the sickening monstrosity.
 

It crumpled near the teen, putridly liquid brain matter oozing from a shattered skull.

Winter panned his flashlight over the whimpering kid. His leg was torn open. A glance at the corpse revealed fresh blood smeared on its hands. But the kid shook his head, fear and a wrenching desire to live making his eyes pulse with desperate energy.

“Please,” the teen begged, clutching his bleeding leg. “Don’t.”

Winter tried to aim his weapon at the kid’s head, training robotically kicking in, but the barrel was unsteady. He tickled the trigger. Wiped the sweat from his face.

The report of a gunshot made even Winter jump. The teen flopped on his back, shot through the head.
 

Winter looked over at Nic. Her eyes were fixed, almost blankly, on the teen’s still and forever-silent body. Her weapon was still extended as if another bullet might be necessary.

“There is no cure,” she whispered softly, monotone voice as empty as a library after hours. Ever so slowly, she lowered her weapon. But her stare never left the dead boy.

“Come on,” Winter said huskily. He tried to touch Nic’s arm and winced inwardly as she shied from him, moving away without expression.

They left the building. No one would come for the remains — the threat of infection in an unsecured area was too great for the niceties of burial. A shroud of dust would be the only covering for victim and attacker where they slept forever, joined here by a dread disease for which there was indeed
no cure
.
 

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

BONE TIRED

EVALUATION CENTER 14 was located in the Ravenna district of Seattle, formerly a quiet bedroom community favored by families and retirees. The cyclone fences that ringed the converted hospital were capped with greased razor wire. Sentries with rifles manned guard towers on every corner and atop both gates. For good measure, each tower was equipped with a tripod-mounted, 60-caliber recoilless rifle.

The measures were not designed to protect the facility from invasion, though there were ample supplies of morphine, epinephrine and other desirable drugs within its walls. No, like a prison, Evaluation Center 14 was designed to keep its patients in. Unlike a prison, more than half of its charges could be described as “on Death Row.” Figuratively, anyway.

An Evaluation Center was where you brought people who might need to be removed from the population. Those who were, invariably, did not end up relocating to tropical climes.

Sprinkled by light, cold rain, a bus adorned with flashing yellow lights was cleared to pass through the front gate.

The bus pulled up to a pair of automatic doors. It disgorged first armored Virus Control troopers and then a stream of dejected civilians. All were old and infirm or visibly injured — there were wheelchairs, walkers and bandages aplenty in this melancholy group. The new arrivals were herded, single file, toward automatic doors as the P.A. system repeated the same message over and over again in a soothing, maternal voice. “Welcome to your Evaluation Center. Please obey all staff instructions. Security personnel are authorized to use lethal force. We thank you for your cooperation.”