Plagued: The Ironville Zombie Quarantine Retraction Experiment (Plagued States of America Book 3) (17 page)

Thirty-
Three

Jones
carried Penelope on his shoulder with one arm and carried his pistol in his opposite hand. His feet crunched through the snow quickly, sinking deeply with each stride. Penelope turned her head to watch as Kennedy’s body faded, along with her hopes of ever being cured.

Her body will just reject the curative.

She’s special

She was part of the
vaccine
study.

What did that mean, vaccine? Penelope wanted to scream. She wanted to climb off of Jones’ shoulder, run back to Kennedy’s body, and shake her until the answers came out.
She wished she could form the words to ask O’Farrell and Jones to explain everything.

“Don’t shoot unless you have to,”
Jones whispered as he passed O’Farrell in the snow.

O’Farrell glanced at Penelope a moment, then stared ahead with a worried expression, both hands cupping the handle of her pistol.

Penelope heard the confused moans drifting through the peacefully falling snow. Some calls came from the right, others to the left, and yet still more ahead of them, all asking one another
which way
? None had an answer. Rudderless, the zombies shifted course and meandered through the haze in search of anything.

Penelope swallowed hard and took a deep breath. She let out a grating moan, too rough, she realized at once. She gasped and sucked in her breath again.

“Wait,” O’Farrell whispered sharply.

Jones stopped.

“What are you doing?” Jones whispered over his shoulder.

Again
, Penelope let out a moan, this time straightening her neck and lifting her head to elongate her rarely used vocal chords. Her throat vibrated as she hummed. She raised her tone and volume as she sought the right pitch. All around her the other moaning stopped. She took another deep breath and let out what felt like a roar of a groan, a call of alarm, a deep fear.

The call was echoed as her own voice
faded.

“What’s she doing?” Jones whispered.

More calls around them resonated with the same fear, echoing and becoming distant, as though an expanding ring of noise were rolling away from them. The wail of fear was replaced with individual grunts and groans as one zombie after another turned away from the source.

“Oh my God,” O’Farrell whispered. Her arms went limp and she let the pistol dangle by her side as she stood upright, staring ahead of them. “They’re turning around.”

Jones lifted Penelope off his shoulder and let her settle onto the snow. He knelt beside her, watching in every direction as the zombies retreated, each struggling to walk in the thick snow, tripping over their own steps and sometimes crawling rather than trying to stand up again. Penelope smiled weakly, proud of herself only long enough to remember that the only reason she could do that was because she was a zombie herself. Her smile faded.

“This is amazing,” O’Farrell whispered. “I wish I had my camera.”

Thirty-Four

“What happened to Doctor Kennedy?” the Senator demanded the moment they reached the snowmobiles.

Jones slid Penelope off his shoulder and helped guide her down onto the snow as Tom rushed beside her.

“Never mind that,” Hank interrupted. “Where are the keys?”

Jones dug into his pocket and withdrew a handful of keys tied to strings.
“There might be a little blood on them. That son of a bitch didn’t want to give them up without a fight.”

“Hallelujah!” Hank took the keys from Jones and held them in the air. “Eleven miles in this weather would have sucked ass.”

“What happened to Kennedy?” the Senator demanded.

“She slipped,” Jones said irritably. “Penny tried to save her
, but got dragged off the roof with her. They both fell. Kennedy landed on her head. She didn’t make it. I think Penny has some broken ribs or something. She was making some funny sounds on the way here.”

“Penny?” Tom asked, reaching his hands to press her sides.

Penelope swatted at his hands.

“Does that hurt?”

She glared at him.

“Where’s Kennedy?
” the Senator kept at it “Why didn’t you bring her?”

“She’s dead,” Jones replied irritably.

“We need to go back for her.”

“Fine,” Jones said. He stood and pointed along his own tracks. “Follow that trail. Hers will be the first body you come across being ripped apart and eaten by zombies.”

“Mason,” O’Farrell said, putting a hand on his arm to calm him. “Senator, she’s dead. She had a skull fracture that broke through the skin. She lost too much blood. She just…died.”

“Hot
diggity dog,” Hank said from one of the snowmobiles. “This key fits. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Where’s
Brooks?” Jones asked.

“He didn’t make it,” Tom said.

“They dragged him back in after we broke through the glass doors with Tom’s shotgun,” Carl said.

There was a somber silence. Jones shook his head and
walked away to help Hank sort out the keys. Without a word, one by one the others went about helping to prepare their escape. Hamilton went back to dusting the snow off the snowmobiles and rafts. The Senator went to sit beside Larissa, who was strapped to the top of a raft with the blanket over her. Carl stood near the Senator with his arms folded, watching Jones. O’Farrell checked on the pilot strapped to the other sled.

“Penny,” Tom asked softly
so the others couldn’t hear him. “Did Kennedy really fall?”

Penelope nodded. She sighed and closed her eyes, reliving the moment in a flash that made her nauseous. She
opened her eyes and sighed. She shook her head as she looked Tom in the eyes, unashamed over what she had done. But they didn’t have a sign that meant
kill
.

“We really need to teach you how to talk,” Tom said
. He fished another pair of sunglasses from his jacket pocket and gently slid them over her eyes. “We’re leaving soon,” he said, squeezing her gloved hands in his.

When everything was set, t
hey started the engines in unison. Tom drove the first snowmobile carrying Hamilton, Penelope, and the one-armed pilot who looked more like a corpse than a man at this point. Hank drove the second with Carl sitting behind him and the Senator and Larissa on its sled. Jones drove the third with O’Farrell hugging him. Tom took the lead with Jones second and Hank last.

The
sled hissed as it slid over the fresh powder. The snow fell sidelong past them, leaving only a wind so cold that Penelope curled up as much as she could in the rescue sled to cover her face and ears.

Time moved slowly in this manner. The engine
chinged
, the snow beneath them hissed, and the echoing whir of the other snowmobiles behind them went on and on. The only thing to break the monotony of their slow progress was the creeping of stark, snow covered trees just at the edge of her vision. Tom followed them like a road. For a while it had a lulling effect, calming her nerves and making her feel that maybe they were actually escaping without any further incident.

But that didn’t last.

She remembered the mounds of snow almost at the same time Tom veered away from the tree line, curving in a wide, slow arc. As he turned, Penelope gazed at hundreds of small igloos dotting the landscape. Several heads rose, shaking the layers of snow off to reveal large, round, alert eyes staring out at them. Two of the forms rose to their feet completely, bulls with shaggy fur that draped over their backs and clung to their sides, meeting in the middle under their bellies where the tattered ends drug against the soft snow.

One charged, its head
down, horns driving low. Snow exploded in front of it, its hooves battering through the powder. Penelope turned away from the sight. Tom revved the engine. The snowmobile leapt forward, yanking the sled, but the bull turned with it, swinging its horns and clipping the back corner of the sled with a deep
thump
. The sled rose into the air, thrown off balance by the bull’s strength. Penelope clutched the strap across her chest as she felt weightless for a second time today.

The raft fell back to the ground, pulling her down with it. She bounced
on the plastic shell. She felt as though the raft were being shaken side to side. She slid into the pilot’s body, then against the partial interior wall that kept her from falling out into the snow. The pilot’s weight pinned her against the wall as the bull lifted the sled for a second time.

Penelope heard the snowmobile engine scream and wail, but they didn’t move except for being turned sideways, and then the whole sled began to topple over toward the snow. Penelope put her arms up to cover her head as she slammed into the soft powder. She thought that might be the end of it, but before she
could breathe, the bull struck again, slamming into the sled and pushing her through the snow, burying her one moment, then lifting her into the air the next.

She hung in the air by the straps at her waist and chest, snow obscuring her vision through the sunglasses that somehow managed to stay on through it all. The bull glared at her, its horns lowering to strike again. Beyond the enormous beast she saw Tom’s snowmobile upturned, its treads still spinning freely. Tom and
Hamilton were both nothing more than dark mounds partly buried in the snow themselves.

The bull
charged and Penelope screamed. Another loud
thump
erupted as the bull’s horns struck the sled just above her. The pilot’s body pressed down on her even harder, squeezing out her last gasp of air. The sled shook again, rattling Penelope’s senses as the shadow of the bull darkened the world around her and the warmth of its mass and heated breath tried to consume her like a waterfall spilling over her.

Blam
!

The bull jerked its head, lifting the sled and tossing it to the side.

Blam, blam, blam!

The pistol fired again and again as though there weren’t enough bullets in the wo
rld to stop the bull’s rampage.

B
lam, blam!

The bull teetered in front of her, swinging its enormous head and body toward the gun.

Blam!

Penelope
gulped for air, wrenching at the straps furiously, finding her voice again to scream and growl, terrorized by everything happening around her. Shadows, the whirring of snowmobile engines, the sound of urgent and soothing voices—it all charged her with the same ferocity as the bull. She screamed again, her eyes shut as she tugged at the strap.

“Penny!” she heard Toms voice break through. “Penny, calm down. Let me help.”

She gulped a sobbing moan, yanking at the strap again, but letting Tom reach in to loosen the clasp. It snapped free and she fell out of the sled into the blood red snow, falling onto her hands and knees next to the hulking mass of the bull.

“Penny,” Tom said soothingly, reaching a hand to her shoulder
, his other hand still holding his pistol.

She shook him off, scrambling on her hands and knees to the side, trying to get away from the bull in the loose, soft snow
, but getting nowhere. Gasping for breath she fell to her side, her eyes wide with terror. Tears rolled down her cheeks and the cold air stung as though her tears were made of acid.

She took a deep breath to try to settle her nerves,
finally having sense enough to take in some of what was around her. Tom stuffed his pistol into its holster and crawled toward her, his body between the bull and hers. Behind him, Jones stood next to the bull, cupping his pistol in both hands. He pointed the gun at the bull as he kicked it in the head. O’Farrell struggled through the snow toward the bent and broken sled.

“Is the pilot alright?” O’Farrell
called out.

“
He’s dead,” Jones replied, not looking toward the sled.

“How can you—dear God!” O’Farrell blurted as she came around the sled to see the pilot’s body hanging from the loose straps, his one arm dangling. A gaping hole punctured the pilot’s chest allowing what little blood he had left to spill out completely.

Jones stared over the dead bull toward the herd, now all standing and gathering in the haze of the falling snow. “We need to get moving. Hamilton, get the snowmobile upright.”

“I think my arm’s broken,”
Hamilton complained.

“Penny, are you hurt?” Tom asked softly.

Penny shook her head, feeling her own chest and legs to make sure. She shook her head again.

“You have blood all over you. Wipe your face with snow.”

Penelope did as she was told, wiping the soft powder against her face. Drops of red water fell into the snow beneath her and stained her gloves. Tom stood up and moved back to the upturned snowmobile.

“I’m taking Penny. Wendy, can you a
nd Jones take Hamilton?”

“Yeah,” Jones replied for her. “Wendy, get the rig.
We’ll wedge him between us.” Jones rushed over to Tom’s snowmobile and helped him turn it back onto its skis and tracks. “Get it started and let’s go.”

Tom turned the key and the engine whirred to life again. Penelope half-crawled, half-walked toward it, wanting nothing more than to escape this place, and all of Biter Territory. Jones turned and picked her up,
placing her onto the snowmobile behind Tom. Even with her frazzled nerves, she managed to hug Tom tightly. He put a hand over hers and the snowmobile lurched forward, once again cruising into the endless white haze.