Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1) (16 page)

“Pax!” Ebenezer shouted happily as I walked across the rooftop toward him.

The old man reached out and gave me a hug. It had been only a few months since I’d seen him, but it felt like a lifetime, and despite our last meeting having gone poorly in my mind, he apparently thought we were old friends.

Maybe he was, actually, a friend.

Ebenezer waved the guards to stand down, and they returned to the lower levels of the building. Rebekah ambled out of the dropship and took her place by my side, holding my hand nervously, but still smiling back at the old man.

“And who is this?” he asked, smiling.

“Rebekah of the tribe of Daniel,” she curtsied.

She had always looked pretty in her dress and bonnet, but seeing her now in the common style always made me stir inside. Her body was impossibly perfect. Rebekah’s nose and jaw bone were the only angular features showing, as her long legs and womanly curves were now accentuated by a tight leather jacket, thick denim leggings, and thigh-high leather boots.

Our clothing was actually ancient of design, but it suited our people well. When mosquitoes were the primary vector of plague transmission in the beginning, the leather and tough, double-layered denim kept the bites away. Now, with mosquitoes being all but extinct in this part of the world, we still didn’t want to take chances of being bit, and the cool Pacific Northwest climate made the layering necessary.

“Ebenezer, the Pirate King of Vancouver,” he said, taking her hand and kissing it gently.

“Pirate?” she giggled. “Where’s your eye-patch and peg-leg?”

I looked surprised.

“We had stories out there, you know,” she scowled at me.

“I may sadly have both my eyes and legs, my dear,” he laughed, “but I do have large amounts of rum.”

He turned to me. “To what do I owe the honor of your return visit to my humble community? And I do promise, lad, that it will be much more hospitable than the last one.”

“Well, I thank you for that,” I said politely. “I’m here to ask for your help. We’re at war with the zombie horde and planning a major attack.”

“Whatever can I do for you?” he asked.

“I need people to fight for us.”

His wrinkled old face slackened.

“Let’s go inside, my boy, and chat a bit.”

We ventured from the old helipad down the stairs. Rebekah stopped and stared across the waves at a building with a saucer-shaped structure perched at the very top.

“It’s so…strange,” she muttered. “Pretty.”

“You’re strange and pretty,” I laughed, kissing her neck while nudging her forward into the doorway.

We went down a few flights of stairs and took seats on the couch in Ebenezer’s parlor, with the doors flanked by his guards. Ebenezer poured himself a drink at the bar, then held a glass up toward me, but I politely waved my hand in refusal.

“I’ll take his,” Rebekah announced.

Ebenezer brought the glasses over and clinked his against Rebekah’s before they both took their first sip.

“Mmm,” Rebekah moaned in pleasure. “That’s mighty fine shine, sir.”

“We make this here, dear Rebekah. It’s actually aged in some metal casks with toasted hickory chips. Hickory! Can you believe it?”

She sipped quickly and took the whole drink down. I remembered coughing embarrassingly when I tried to drink that stuff before.

“So you want me to fight against zombies,” Ebenezer chuckled, flopping into an old oversized chair. A bit of dust flew up as he did.

“Maybe not you, exactly, sir,” I said, respectfully, “but you have your own private army. And you have your young adults and children who can fight using robots they control with their minds.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Pax,” he said, licking his lips. “We may not abhor technology here, but we’re not going to plug ourselves into it.”

“You have to join the fight,” I implored. “The Horde is coming and they won’t stop until every last human is destroyed.”

“Until every last robot is destroyed,” the old man said sternly. “There are still humans holding out across the globe. You’ve been out there, I’ve heard. You know.”

“Yes, but how did you know that?” I asked.

“I am a man who prides himself on knowing what’s going on. It seems you had quite an adventure in the Plaguelands.”

“Then you know what’s coming,” I retorted.

“A horde of mindless zombies,” he said softly, “that will murder, eat, and rape their way across the continent until they get to the ocean and then they’ll stop.”

“They’re coming to end the Republic.”

“Well we’re not in the Republic, my lad. Remember?”

“But you are surrounded by it. Your position here, between the old capital and the new one, in the bay surrounded by the Republic’s protection. No mosquitoes or plague. No zombies. You’re reaping all the benefits without paying in, and I’m just asking you to finally pay.”

“I haven’t paid?” the Pirate King laughed. “For longer than you’ve been alive I’ve been stewing about on these rocks, trying to make a better life for my family while being outcast by the fools who raised me. I’ve paid dearly.”

“I mean no disrespect, sir,” I pleaded, “but they’re coming to end everything. They have nuclear weapons, and probably the means to detonate them.”

“Dear God,” he muttered. “Can you be certain?”

“I saw them in Omaha, with my own eyes.”

Rebekah nodded. “We both did.”

Ebenezer stroked his chin.

“Please, sir. Please, Mister Ebenezer. My daddy, my brothers, and most of my family and friends have been lost to that monster Reverend and his creatures. Anything you can do to help might help us turn the river against him.”

“If what you say is true,” the old man said contemplatively, “then we need to get going. Get out of here. Far, far away. All of us.”

“Please,” I whispered.

“There are far too few of us here to help you, son,” he said with sorrow in his voice. “A few hundred ragged souls just trying to get by. Suffering silently. No immortality. No ultra-advanced technology. Why ask us?”

“Because, as a man who prides himself on knowing things, you probably know how poorly the war has been going since Omaha.”

He nodded. “It seems that this Reverend fellow is more than a match for the vaunted Republic Vanguard, eh?“

“We never expected to have to fight a large-scale conflict against the zombies,” I said, echoing the marshal’s words. “The Republic is mobilizing divisions of enhanced forms, but that will take some time. They’ve got kids being plugged into augmented reality systems to operate warrior drones. They’ve even got a division of biologic troops being gathered from across the Eastern Slope. But the zombies have the numbers and the ferocity and the animalistic bloodlust that we just can’t match unless everyone pulls it together. And if they nuke the capital, the fallout will spread here and ruin everything you have struggled for.”

Ebenezer stared into his glass, watching the light reflect through the liquid and split into the colors of the rainbow on his hand.

“There’s no person I can spare,” he said softly, “and in fact, we’ll definitely be leaving this place now, probably bound for another island or another ruined city on our ships. I don’t know where yet. But I do know that I can give you one gift before I take my family far away from this danger: the gift of insight.”

I peered at him quizzically.

”We monitor the low-band frequencies for any messages from enclaves of humanity left in the wilds. As you know, there are a lot of towns and farms and villages where they’ve miraculously survived not only the virus, but the rampaging of the Horde. Some of those enclaves still use ancient low-frequency or short-wave technology. We found something at the lowest end of the frequency bands. Listen to this.”

He raised his hand and his tall assistant with the short brown beard came over to us, holding out some sort of recording device. He pressed a button, and a low rumbling sound was heard, punctuated by three higher pitched thrums, then the low rumble again. The pattern repeated over and over.

Hrrrrummmm…thrum…thrum…thrum…hrrrrummmm.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It’s a signal,” he smiled.

“Whose signal, and what does it mean?”

“You’d better see this,” Ebenezer chuckled. “Charles, bring me the digibook with the video file that the Californians sent.”

The assistant retrieved a digibook from a shelf on the other side of the room and handed it to the old man. Ebenezer held it aloft for me to watch.

It showed a zombie drudge in a glass room, snarling and throwing itself against the walls. Blood and pus streaked the glass, which rattled with every impact, but didn’t scratch or shatter. The zombie’s aggression peaked when another human—this one wearing a lab coat—came into view holding another recording device on the other side of the glass. As the same
thrum-thrum-thrum
played, the zombie calmed down. It spoke a few words in that gibberish Southern-style tongue, then moved to the opposite side of the cage and slowly pushed and nudged at the walls before curling up into a ball. When the man in the lab coat switched off the signal, the zombie resumed its previous aggression.

Ebenezer turned off the video and put down the tablet. “The Californians think that someone is using this signal to calm the zombies and push them westward. They aren’t 100 percent sure, but they think that this four-hertz signal actually syncs with the brainwaves in the zombies and helps restore some level of cognition. Like an ultra-low-frequency dose of aspirin. For whatever reason, it’s working. We haven’t been able to triangulate the signal because ULF is designed to penetrate through the earth and travel great distances. It almost seems to be coming from three different places, but that’s probably a mistake in the software we’re using.”

“So if we can find the source of the signal,” I postulated, “then we should be able to turn it off, and the zombies will revert to the mindless mass instead of an army pushing in one direction.”

“That’s the idea,” he nodded.

“You keep mentioning the Californians, and these other enclaves. Who are they? And would they stand to fight against the Horde?”

“That’s yet to be seen,” he scowled into his nearly glass.

“Is there anyone else you know we could call upon?”

The grey-haired man cocked an eye.

”Oh there’s plenty of folks out there to call upon,” he said. “You really think you’re the last government on Earth? You really think you’re the most advanced?”

The old man laughed, swirled his whiskey in his glass, and took a sip.

“It seems it’s time for a history lesson, Pax Faustus. There are still a few small nations—island nations, mostly—that instituted a quarantine that has never been lifted. The island nation of Iceland survived and merged with Greenland right after the Plague struck. Tristan de Cunha survived. Ascension Island. Some of the most far-flung places on the planet were able to withstand the Plague and are still in contact with us through old-time short-wave radio.”

It was almost too much to believe.

“We’re in contact with as many as we can find. Mostly small, subsistence nations that have reverted to pre-Industrial civilization, except for Iceland, which is surprisingly advanced. Oh, and let’s not forget about the California Republic or the Kerguelen Dominion.”

I knew of California. It was a “state” in the old United States that dissolved at the time of the Plague.

He stared at the floor as he spoke, almost out of respect. “Two of the independent nations on
this
continent—the Ozark Collective and the Kingdom of Taos—both went off the air within the last couple of weeks. We assume that as the Horde moved westward, they destroyed everyone and everything in their path.”

He stayed silent for a moment.

“Is there anyone left who is strong enough to be an ally? What about these Californians?”

Ebenezer coughed. “The Californians were nearly annihilated by the disease and the climate change. All of their major sea-level cities were flooded, their mountain towns were scorched by fires, and their desert towns dried up. But they were still wealthy and ingenious and powerful. Over the last hundred years, with the stabilization of the climate and the slight retreat of the seas, they’ve expanded. New San Francisco is built on the hills south of the old city and is their capital, with over a million people. Redding has a million residents. Yosemite has half a million. Big Bear is pretty large, and they’re actually reforesting there. They have outposts as far south as Fallbrook and as far east as Mount Charleston, near Las Vegas. The California Republic, again using their ancient moniker, is an independent and powerful nation. They’ve had two small skirmishes with the Republic Vanguard over keeping the border at the Rogue River when they tried to push north toward Roseburg.”

“How did they defeat the zombies? C-virus?” I asked, incredulously.

“Mosquito abatement,” Ebenezer smiled. “They genetically engineered fish that primarily eat mosquito larvae, just like the Republic did. You might say that someone leaked them the information on how to do it. Anyway, along with chemical treatments and physical barriers, they’ve kept the mosquito vector minimized and they physically repelled the zombies…so they’re actually beginning to prosper. If only they could get their water distribution problems under control….”