Redemption of the Dead (16 page)

Putting her
hands on her hips, Billie took in a slow, deep breath, held it a
moment, then breathed out slowly. “Seems to me the plan was seen as
a good one by those looking on,” she said, referring to the angelic
forces she’d become acquainted with, “but your timetable and theirs
were on different schedules.”

“Whose?” Sven asked.

“Angels,” Billie said
squarely.

Sven arched an eyebrow. So did Bastian
and Isabel, each looking at her like she was crazy.

“The man in
the white coat, you didn’t think he was human, did you? You said he
disappeared right in front of you.” She knew she was no better,
though, because when she first saw Nathaniel in his elderly man
form, she thought he was just an old guy with an unusual dress
code. It was only when he spoke to her despite her being invisible
to everyone else did she realize he was something
different.

Isabel
smugly smiled and wobbled her head with pride. “I knew
it.”

As if.

“Yah, me too,” Sven said, clearly
lying. He jabbed his elbow into Bastian’s ribs.

“Me too, yah,” Bastian
said.

“Whatever,
guys,” Billie said. She took a moment, got her head together, then
got down to business. “’Kay, I was told to recruit those who would
stand with us against the dead. Why me or for what purpose, I don’t
know. In the end, I was sent here—”

“How?” Isabel asked.

“Let me finish. I was sent here to get
you guys. Fine. Here we are.” She furrowed her brow. “Actually,
where are we?”

“Austria,” Sven said.

Of course. Austria.
“Okay then,” she said. “It’s clear that you guys, at least
for now, are weapons people. This whole place is loaded with things
we can use.” Turning to Isabel, she asked, “How much arms do you
think you have?”

“Oh, I don’t
know, enough to thoroughly equip probably a thousand
men.”

“Serious?”

“Yes. What you see here are our
experiments. There’s a chamber beyond where we store our completed
work.”

“Your
completed work?”

“Would you like to see?”

It was getting a little too hard to
swallow, yet it made sense there’d be factions out there working on
ways to take the Earth back from the dead. “Okay.”

Isabel went
to what looked like a regular garage door in the corner. Sven
lifted it open for her, and the four of them went into another
large room beyond, this one as big as the room they were just in,
however the walls, floor and ceiling were made of cement. Lining
the walls were rows of arms, ammo, defense shields and helmets. A
couple of cars that were outfitted for combat were in the middle,
but the biggest surprise of all lay beyond the vehicles.

“You got to
be kidding me,” Billie said slowly, walking ahead of the group and
heading right for the row of over a dozen armored humanoid
transports. They looked like robots outfitted with wheels along
their legs. The actual form was very boxy with a domed hood at the
top for the head. Billie thumbed toward them and called back to the
others. “You call this ‘cobbled together?’ Man, you actually built
these things?”

“Over time,”
Isabel said.

“They test ride very good,” Sven
said.

“Ride?” Billie said.

“Ride,” said Bastian.

“You can actually go in
them?”

Isabel came
up beside her and ran a hand over one of the armored humanoid’s
hull. “This is our D-K-Fourteen-P-Two-X.” She cleared her throat.
“Our Dead Killer Fourteen—as it took fourteen separate designs to
make it work—Phase Two—second edition of the fourteenth model for
more stable use—Exoskeleton.”

Billie’s
legs went rubbery. “A mech? Are you serious?” She knew what mechs
were, but those were the things of science fiction and Japanese
animation not science fact.

“It was the
only suitable design for hand-to-hand combat. Not meant for strict
one-on-one battles, but for entering a horde of the undead and
being able to keep the upper hand the whole while.”

“You’ve tested it?”

“Just on the cattle.”

“I
s amazing, no?”
Bastian said.

Sven came up beside Billie and looked
at her. “Special.”

She blushed without meaning to. “You
have twelve of them?”

“Thirty-six,” Isabel said, “the other two dozen are
off-site in two secure locations for safekeeping.”

Billie
rounded the front of the DK-14-P2-X. It was almost triple her
height, probably around thirteen or fourteen feet tall. The
computer geek inside her was itching to climb into it and see how
it worked. She’d feel awkward asking, though, so she didn’t say
anything. “How long until you can get everything up and
running?”

“Three hours.”

“For just
the DKs or everything?”

“Just the
DKs. About six for everything else. We have procedures in place for
assembling an army if required.”

Billie nodded. “I was told to recruit
so that’s what I’m doing.” She went right up to Isabel. Sven
followed behind like a puppy dog, Bastian beside his brother.
“Assemble everyone, then. Do you have GPS or some sort of
navigating system?”

“GPS went
down when the satellites were stopped being up kept, but we do have
navigating procedures for long distances. Where are we
going?”

“Winnipeg,” she said.

“Where?”

“I’ll show you,” Billie
said.

* * * *

15

The Safe House

T
racy had been
able to take down three of the dead.
Those ones were of the extremely slow-moving variety and were
harmless unless they got their rotten fingers on someone. Two
others had gone down with the cleaver. She lost the mallet when she
meant to bash another one’s skull and instead missed when the
creature unexpectedly moved in the opposite direction. It had been
knocked from her hand by another before she had a chance to try
again.

Now she was
moving as fast as she could down the adjacent street, able to
outrun some of them, others hot on her tail. Her hand was pressed
to her side, her shirt damp with blood. As she’d observed before,
many of the undead were getting more and more aggressive, even more
capable and were transitioning from slow-moving, incompetent
flesh-eaters to feral killing machines.

Tracy
couldn’t lead them to the safe house, but she also didn’t want to
spend the better part of the day trying to outrun and hide from
them. They had to be taken down except there were too many of
them.

She turned
and jumped in behind a taxi that had gone and rammed itself up over
the curb, and waited a moment to see if she’d lost them. Their
ever-nearing footfalls said otherwise. Back on her feet, she
maneuvered in between the traffic-filled street, using the cars
like a hedge maze to slow down the dead. At the end of the street,
she ran into a parking lot which had been an old construction site,
one that appeared to have been in the process of repaving the lot
and setting up short concrete walls as dividers between certain
areas.

She saw a
shovel on the ground by the cement mixer. She picked it up along
with a bucket of dried cement beside it. The bucket weighed at
least fifty pounds and she was thankful she was able to lift it
albeit with a heft of effort.

As the dead started to come out of the
maze of cars, she swallowed the dry lump in her throat and
approached them head-on. She knew she wouldn’t take them all down,
but if she could remove some of the threat, perhaps the others
would get the idea and move on, or at the very least become a small
enough group for her to finally evade.

The moment
the first zombie neared, Tracy dropped the shovel, grabbed the
bucket of cement by both hands, and spun around in a circle,
gaining momentum. She whipped the bucket across the zombie’s head,
splattering its skull. As the creature fell, she went to do the
same thing to the next one, but the momentum from her original spin
made her fumble and she ended up lobbing the bucket at the undead
woman instead. The creature held out its arms as if to catch it.
The bucket slipped between its arms and landed on its toes. The
monster merely stumbled around it and came forward.

Tracy lunged
for the shovel, picked it up, then brought it back around like a
baseball bat to the female zombie’s head, the shovel’s rusty metal
scoop slicing through the creature’s skull like a pickax into
tightly-packed earth. She pulled the shovel free and brought it
down on the next approaching zombie, this one an elderly woman,
short, with half her face rotted away. Knocking the woman’s skull
from her body like a ball off a tee was easy work. Right after,
Tracy jabbed the shovel into the rotting guts of a nearing undead
Asian man. She tore through his stomach in one fluid motion, his
guts spilling out at his feet in slops of black goo and intestines
that looked more like rotten lasagna. He kept moving forward and
she brought the shovel back the opposite way and smacked him in the
head, knocking him down.

About to
turn and run out of there, she was intercepted by a hillbilly of a
zombie with three teeth, a long beard that was ripped out from its
jaw in places, and overalls without a shirt underneath. The thing
flopped its arms over the shovel’s shaft, the force enough to cause
her to drop it. She pushed Huckleberry-dead to the side, pulled out
the cleaver, and brought it across the back of the hillbilly’s
head. She got the blade a good ways through, but it wasn’t enough
to kill it. The creature turned around, grabbing her in the
process, mouth open and coming in for the kill. She jerked the
cleaver free from its skull, got it over its mouth, saving herself
from getting bit, and pushed herself away. She immediately lunged
back, bringing down the cleaver on its head, splitting it like a
coconut.

She hit one
and kicked another, shoved two small ones at the same time into the
two behind them, causing them to trip over each other and
fall.

Having
thinned the ranks some, Tracy took the cleaver to the heads of two
more before sprinting away, once again using the crushed vehicles
on the street as a means of confusion to any that pursued
her.

After a couple of blocks, the stitch
in her side forced her to stop running. She took
a few deep breaths then moved at a brisk walk.

Finally
, she was on
the right heading to the library. Mouth dry, she couldn’t wait to
see if there was something there to drink. Cautious of the undead
that might have followed, she remained off the street and hid in a
partly-buried bus shelter until she felt the coast was clear and
she could emerge and get to her final destination.

* * * *

The secret lever leading into the safe house was inside a
telephone booth that had been partly crushed in the rubble the day
the Millennium Library fell. The booth itself sat on an angle
against the heap of ruin, most of it above the surface of the
debris, its bottom portion hidden beneath slabs of concrete. Tracy
pulled out her “key,” the small flathead screwdriver given at the
Hub. She put it in the middle screw that kept the phone unit itself
in place against the rear inside wall of the phone booth. The screw
she turned was actually an extension of a key, which unlocked the
phone unit as a whole, allowing it to swing open on small hinges.
Though Tracy thought the whole
Mission Impossible
aspect of this a bit excessive, she understood the reason
for the secrecy: security, randomly hidden. She pulled a small
lever inside the phone unit and there was a loud click; the lower
half of the rear phone booth wall swung open. She closed the phone
unit, crouched, and stepped into the back of the phone booth. Once
in, she closed the small door behind her, counted three steps
forward, two to the left, all the while keeping one hand along the
rough cement wall of the narrow corridor she found herself on.
Navigating in the dark wasn’t easy for anyone, hence the step
count. At the end of the narrow corridor, about ten feet from where
she first entered, was another door. She felt for the handle, found
it, then opened the door.

The dim
lighting was easy on the eyes as she stepped down a short set of
stairs to what used to be the library’s first floor. If the lights
were on, somebody had to be home.

The room had been partitioned into
strategy centres, living quarters, kitchen, bathroom facilities, a
large workshop, and a chapel. The partition walls were made of
wood, unpainted so the colors and types varied, each running floor
to ceiling. If anyone was here, they’d be in one of these
sections.

Tracy went down the center aisle.
“Hello?”

The closer
she neared the first partition, the louder the voices behind came.
When she peered in, she saw two men in ratty T-shirts and jeans
looking at a map that was spread out on a table, small pebbles and
stones of different colors placed purposefully along the map’s
grids. The men saw her, but didn’t give her a nod. She wasn’t sure
if they recognized her or not.