Plague World (Ashley Parker Novel) (17 page)

“Redundancy,” Nathan replied brusquely. He jogged over toward the aircraft—and Simone—without another word.

JT raised an eyebrow and looked at me.

“And that means…?”

“You’re the walking dictionary,” I said by way of avoiding the question.

He raised his eyebrow even higher and nodded.

“Okay, I can play,” he said. “Same reason we ditched the second ’copter back at UCSF. One’s a decoy, to throw the bad guys off our track, yes?”

Damn, he’s good
, I thought, but kept my mouth shut and my expression neutral.

He grinned. “Thought so.” He looked like he had something else to say, and I held up a hand.

“Er… hold that thought. Gotta pee,” I said, and escaped toward the fountain and the porta-johns.

I passed the Gunsy Twins standing in front of the helicopters as they kept a keen watch on the surrounding terrain—trails leading off into the hills, and a large parking lot, surprisingly empty of cars. A long driveway led out to the main road. One of the Twins—Davis, I think—gave me a small salute and what passed for a smile on his expressionless face. I wiggled my fingers in return.

“Ash!”

Lil came bounding toward me from the porta-johns. I gave her a tired but sincere smile as she threw her arms around me in a hug before releasing me almost immediately with a nose-wrinkled grimace.

“You’re soaked,” she said. “And you smell gross.”

“Slipped on a rock,” I said evasively. Lil handled danger to herself without fear, but she tended to flip out, even after the fact, if someone she cared about got injured or even came close. Kai’s death hadn’t helped.

I saw motion out of the corner of my eye, and a few scattered figures lurched slowly toward us from the other side of the parking lot. Jones and Davis made quick work of them, but more were headed our way up the long driveway leading from the main road.

Time to do my business
, I thought wearily.

I picked up my pace to the fountain, stepping over and around a number of aluminum dog dishes that littered the ground. As I bent over to get a sip of water, I accidentally kicked an empty dish set on the ground under a low faucet. It clattered against the pavement and the resulting clatter brought a moan from somewhere nearby. I whirled around but didn’t see anything. It sounded again—a muffled hollow echo accompanied it, like a kid pretending to be a ghost.

The porta-johns.

Crap.

No pun intended, but I still had to use the bathroom.

Marching over to the cluster of glorified outhouses, I banged on the door to the first one, and something banged back, dead palms slapping against the hard plastic.
Damn, what a shitty coffin.
The little sign said “OCCUPIED” and I planned on leaving it that way.

The next one showed the green “VACANT.” I raised my hand to knock, but the door swung out before I made contact. I jumped back just in time to avoid getting smacked. My adrenalin spiked, and my hand tightened around the grip of my tanto as I prepared to dispatch—

Griff.

“I’m sorry, was I taking too long?” he inquired.

I caught my breath and growled—an involuntary rumble deep in my throat. I’d come
that
close to stabbing him. Part of me wished I’d at least grazed him, and given him a good scare. But as much as he deserved it, killing a fellow human being wasn’t on my agenda for the day.

Even so, I didn’t trust him.

“I’ve heard of friendly fire,” Griff continued in that obnoxiously amused tone of his, “but friendly thrusts? Shouldn’t those be—”

“Oh, just shut the fuck up,” I said, pushing past him. I banged on the next door down. Nothing banged back, so I went inside, making sure to lock it behind me. It smelled less offensive on the inside than its neighbor had from the outside, but I still took a quick peek down the hole. As I did so, a truly gross scene from a Norwegian zombie movie played through my mind.

I did my business, and got out of there in record time.

As soon as I emerged, Nathan waved impatiently for me to join them. I quickly rinsed my hands in the faucet by the dog bowls, glancing out over the cliff as glimpses of the sun burned through the fog.

It was eerily beautiful, eucalyptus and cypress trees sharing ground with the crumbling walls of the old battery. Trails wound around the tree-studded hills, and I could see why this would be a paradise for dogs and their owners. I wondered if it ever would be again, or if Dr. Albert’s plague had screwed it up for good.

Nathan called my name as the helicopter rotors started
whupwhupwhupping
in rotation. One of the helicopters took off, heading toward North Island and following the original plan, but without any of the wild cards on board. Instead it had members of the Zombie Tactical Squad, people Simone trusted beyond a shadow of a doubt, and who could handle themselves if anything went wrong, like another helicopter malfunction.

Nathan climbed aboard the remaining chopper, which I suspected came from a source other than the DZN. I had a feeling Simone or Nathan had called in a last-minute favor to put yet one more layer of smoke and mirrors between us and our unknown enemies. I walked toward it, my limbs suddenly leaden even as the wind from the rotors whipped my still-wet hair about my face. The resulting sting was surprisingly painful.

Our new ride was slightly roomier than the one that we’d started out with that morning. It had two rows of two seats facing front, currently occupied by Simone, Nathan, Carl, and the same female mechanic who’d flown with us to Walgreen’s. Eight more seats ran parallel down the length of the helicopter, four on either side. Lil, Gentry, JT, and Griff were on one side, while the Gunsy twins and Tony occupied the other. I took the remaining seat in the very back and curled up as tightly as I could, trying to ignore how wet and cold I was.

I wondered if anything in my pack had survived without being soaked.

Oh, crap, what if Lil’s meds got wet? Were they in watertight containers? They had to be, right?

My shivering increased, but I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open. I started to drop off to sleep, only to have another shiverfest wrack my body, waking me up again, although I didn’t open my eyes.

I felt someone near me, and then something warm and dry was draped over my lap. My hand touched the surface of a blanket. Scratchy, but warm. I smiled drowsily at whoever put it there.

“Thanks,” I said sleepily.

“Any time.”

My smile froze as I recognized Griff’s voice. I deliberately kept my eyes shut until I heard him moving away from me. When I opened them, he was sitting a few seats ahead of me on the other side, an odd little smile on his face. Lil and JT stared in my direction, as vigilant as Foo Dogs standing guard in Imperial China.

I couldn’t imagine what Griff’s motivation had been, and my brain was just too tired to wrap itself around the puzzle. Finally, I gave up trying. The bottom line was that I was finally getting warm again, and needed sleep more than I needed to think.

So I slept.

I sat down in the back of Room 217 in Patterson Hall, hoping against hope that the cute but douchey teaching assistant wouldn’t notice that I’d been late yet again. Last thing I needed was another public humiliation—something else to make me stand out as a twenty-nine-year-old student on campus filled with kids ten years my junior.

Kids who were just waiting to steal my husband.

No wait. He was already gone.

No big loss.
I had Matt now, my hunky younger boyfriend.

But Matt’s dead.

I looked down to the front of the hall, admiring the cute TA. His mint gold hair gleamed against the black of his shirt and Kevlar vest. The look suited his features. He seemed like an angel who’d gone a few rounds with Rocky, a once broken nose set slightly crooked, throwing off otherwise regular features.

Gabriel.

Gabriel was the hunky TA, and also my boyfriend. I still had him, even if he
was
a douche at times.

I smiled down at him, wondering idly why he was wearing his SWAT gear to teach in, instead of his usual jeans and button-down shirt. Very sexy, mind you, with just a hint of “Oh, are you wearing handcuffs, officer?”

I kind of hoped he was.

But should he really be wearing something like that to class?

Appropriate or not, it was going over well with the students.

Not that any of them looked that great—not even the bevy of coach-carrying blondes in the front row, hanging on his every word. Half of them looked sick, snuffling and coughing, and the other half…

Huh.

The other half looked dead.

Yup, zombies.

In class.

Shouldn’t I be doing something about them?

Gabriel looked up and saw me dithering in the back of the room. I braced myself for the inevitable snarky comment, but he smiled up at me, his denim-blue eyes warm and affectionate. He dropped the book he held on the floor. It landed with a loud, echoing
thunk
, much louder than seemed possible, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He walked eagerly up the center aisle toward me, the initial warmth in his eyes darkening to something just as welcoming, but more primal.

I waited where I was instead of running toward him, afraid if I moved he’d vanish. He kept smiling as he neared me, but his face didn’t look quite right. His skin seemed unusually sallow, almost green in places. Faint hollows under his eyes grew darker with each step, and the startling blue of his corneas began filming over until they were the bluish white of curdled skim milk. Pieces of skin curled off his cheekbones in strips, and the bright gold of his hair became dull and matted, patches of skull showing through.

I knew I should do something—kill him or run—but I couldn’t move. Didn’t
want
to move. It was still Gabriel. Wasn’t it? So I stayed rooted in place until he stood in front of me, still smiling although now his teeth were coated with blood and black fluid. His hands clutched my shoulders as the rest of the students lurched to their feet, staggering slowly toward us.

“I’ve missed you, Ash,” he said, voice clogged with unspeakable gore. “Have you missed me?”

He lowered his face to kiss me, those gore-stained lips closing over mine before I could scream.

* * *

I jerked awake, a scream choking in my throat to stop it from ripping through the confines of the helicopter. My eyes flew open and I sat up straight, heart pounding.

Jeez Louise.
I looked around. No zombies, no Gabriel. No one seemed to have noticed my nightmare, for which I was very grateful.

“You okay?” Griff opened his eyes and looked at me.

Oh, hell.

He wasn’t wearing his usual smirk, but I wasn’t about to give him any more ammunition.

“Yup, just dandy.”

“Looked like one hell of a bad dream.”

If I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn he looked concerned.

“Last time I was in one of these things, it crashed,” I said. “Not a fan of flying.”

He nodded and closed his eyes.

I stared at him for a moment before pulling the blanket—the one he’d given me—back up around my shoulders. So far he’d tried to flirt with me, assault me, and tucked me in like a kid at naptime. I
so
did not get him. Then again, I didn’t want him, so that was okay.

Tony snored next to me, sounding like a muffled chainsaw under the noise of the rotors. I wondered how long we’d been in the air, and pondered the ability of humans to sleep under the most stressful of circumstances.

Someone wake up Hicks, indeed.

I twisted around in my seat and looked out the window at the landscape passing below us. I could see the ocean off to the right, with rolling green fields, vineyards, and buildings directly below. A few curvy roads meandering through the landscape. I didn’t see any people, although I saw a few horses and cows grazing in wide-open areas. I was guessing we were flying over Paso Robles or thereabouts.

We stopped to refuel at an isolated private airport somewhere north of Santa Barbara and everyone but the mechanic and the Gunsy Twins stayed inside the helicopter. The mechanic refueled while the snipers kept watch.

A long winding drive led from the tarmac up to a two-story house. There was no overt sign of life, but I saw a shadow cross in front of one of the windows. No one living or dead emerged from the house. Even if it were the owner of the airport, the sight of Jones and Davis with their fancy-schmancy firearms would deter him from storming out and demanding payment.

I shut my eyes again, trying not to see Gabriel’s rotting face, and wondering if my dream was fear or premonition. What if he was really too far gone to bring back? If he didn’t have his antiserum, his options really sucked. So we had to find him before he was forced to choose.

I felt the weight of someone staring at me, and immediately suspected Griff. I raised my lids to half-mast and looked in his direction. His eyes were closed, however, so maybe I’d imagined it.

My eyes drooped again, body and mind demanding more sleep. I knew I needed it, but I was reluctant to chance it—run the risk of another horror show sponsored by my subconscious and my innermost fears.

What if it’s not just your fears
, my subconscious whispered in my ear.
What if you’re just facing what you already know? What if you’re just seeing the future?

Sorry
, I growled back mentally.
I don’t believe in psychic powers.

But how can you be sure?

“Go play with my inner child and shut the hell up,” I muttered under my breath. My subconscious settled into a smug silence, having made its point.

Asshole subconscious.

I closed my eyes and fell into an uneasy doze.

At least it was dream free.

“The village looks alive enough to me,” the warlord muttered impatiently as he looked down on his next target, a remote native settlement somewhere in the highlands of Congo-Kinshasa.