Soft Apocalypses (19 page)

“Hmm.” She knocked on the door, and I heard the solid rap of bone on steel. “I think we have a winner.”

“What are you looking for?”

She stuck the crowbar’s chisel tip in the door crack by the knob and started heaving. “You’ll probably sleep better tonight if you don’t know the details.”

“I ... can’t say I like that answer.”

“Didn’t expect you would. You just have to trust me for now.”

The door gave with a squeal of metal and slammed open against the cinderblock wall. Tura shined her light inside. The first things I saw were racks and racks of custom-made gaming PCs, screaming fast monster computers with cases sculpted to look like alien beasts.

I cocked an eyebrow at her. “You planning to challenge the zombies to a Halo deathmatch?”

She laughed, stepped into the closet, and plucked a bright yellow software package off a lower shelf. I caught a glimpse of the words “HüDü Linux: Smartphone Edition” on the box before she shoved it into her rucksack. Tura grabbed some other boxes that looked like they contained some kind of wireless cards and stuck them in her bag as well.

“Let’s roll,” she said.

The next day, we pulled up in front of the Tranquility Creek Wildlife Center. The place was abandoned. Through the front gates, I could see dozens of empty animal cages, their galvanized steel doors swaying gently in the hot breeze.

“Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” Tura clapped her hands like a little girl.

“Okay, seriously, what are you planning?” I asked.

She pulled one of the .22 rifles off the rack behind us and pressed it into my hands. “We’re hunting big game.
But
. I don’t want you to kill anything we find. We need to bring ‘em back alive. Well.
Undead
. Shoot only if you have no choice; better to run first.”

I followed her into the abandoned wildlife center and we began to sneak around, looking for … well, I still wasn’t clear on that.

But when we came across a tiger pacing back and forth in a concrete drainage ravine, it was clear from Tura’s reaction that we’d found it. The tiger was
huge
. She looked to be six feet long, not counting her tail, and close to 300 pounds. And her fur was in great shape. You wouldn’t have known she was a zombie, except for her gray tongue and spoiled-milk eyes.

“Perfect.” Tura gestured for me to follow her back to the truck, and we snuck away before the big cat had a chance to spot or smell us.

“Perfect for what?” I whispered back.

“Did you know that Siberian tigers prey on bears?” She had the serious tone of a nature show narrator.

“I did not know that, no.”

“Truth. They eat the Russian version of grizzly bears. There isn’t a land predator a tiger can’t kill. And that especially includes humans.”

Her plan was starting to take fuzzy shape in my head, but it still didn’t make any sense to me. “So … you want to use that tiger to get rid of the zombies surrounding Mickey’s lab?”

“Exactly,” she replied. “And the tiger won’t run out of ammo.”

My face grew warm with frustration. “How in the name of sweet buttered corn are we going to keep that thing from killing
us
instead?”

Tura smiled in a way that a lot of folks might have found scary. “One thing at a time, doll.”

Once we were back at the truck, Tura pulled out the yellow HüDü Linux box and the other stuff we’d gathered the past few days. She spent a good hour or so thumbing through the manual from the box and fiddling with her phone.

“Okay.” She reached into the software box and pulled out a silvery metal rod, maybe six inches long and a half inch in diameter. “I think this is doable.”

“What happens now?” I asked.

“Well, now you get to dust off your judo skills and shove this rod down the tiger’s throat.”

“... What? N-no way.”

“Now, Johnnie. Don’t be a fraidy-cat.” Tura gave me a look that was one part
I dare you
and two parts
You owe me and you know it
.

Crap. I did owe her, and I did know it, but I wasn’t suicidal. Or stupid. “What about that part where you said that tiger could kill a grizzly bear?”

“You just have to get it a couple of inches down her throat. Easy-peasy considering she’ll be trying to eat you, right? Shouldn’t take you but a few seconds.”

“She’ll tear me to pieces in just a few seconds!”

Tura sighed and pointed at the pile of canvas and the duct tape. “Johnnie. You’ll be protected, don’t worry.”

Tura had me put on a set of the spare motorcycle leathers we’d salvaged—they were too big for me, but at least the pants stayed up—and then began to mummy me with wide strips of canvas and duct tape. By the time she was done, I was sweating buckets inside the leather and more than a little dizzy from the heat. But now I was wearing a pretty passable replica of a padded tactical training suit. I had a glimmer of hope it would survive ten seconds with a tiger.

“Are you gonna pass out?” she asked, peering at my face. It probably looked like a stewed tomato.

I shook my head.

“Can you bend your arms? Can you walk?”

I did an awkward macarena and waddled forward a few steps.

“Looking good!” She plopped a motorcycle helmet onto my head and cinched it under my swaddled chin. “Let’s go.”

As I waddled down into the ravine where the tiger paced, I felt like I was wading into the shark-infested water at Smyrna Beach wearing a chum bikini. But, as Tura had explained it, there wasn’t any other way. We had to get the rod down the tiger’s throat or we’d have no way to control it. And tranquilizers didn’t work on zombies, and we didn’t have any tranqs anyway. Nor were either of us good enough with a rope to do the cowgirl thing.

I stepped on a twig, and the tiger’s head jerked around toward me, her black lips skinning away from algae-greened fangs the length of my fingers. Her pebble-rattling growl made me wish I’d taken a moment to go use the ladies’ room, but it was too late for that now.

“Here kitty kitty kitty ….” I flipped my helmet’s visor down.

The tiger—I was starting to think of her as Fluffy—sprang at me with speed I hadn’t imagined. Three hundred pounds of fanged, clawed undead cat tackled me, and the air woofed out of my lungs as she slammed me down on the concrete. Fortunately I held onto the rod.

I’d been in this position before, back when super-heavyweight Amazonia Kartovsky took me down to the mat in our fight in Mexico. I wrapped my legs tight around the tiger’s midsection so she couldn’t rip my belly open with her back claws. And then before she could chomp down on my helmet I grabbed her snout with my left hand and pushed her away.

Fluffy roared at me and began to rip into the canvas on my shoulders with her front claws. The air filled with a flurry of canvas shreds. The blast of her breath seeped into my helmet and choked me. Cats don’t have sweet exhalations at the best of times, but take the worst rotten-toothed, putrid-tuna, paint-peeling stink you’ve ever smelled and amp that to a level that threatens sanity and you’d have some idea of what that tiger’s tonsil gas smelled like. In a word,
gross
.

I gritted my teeth against the bile rising fast in my throat and thrust the rod down Fluffy’s slimy gullet, shoving my arm in all the way to my elbow. She buzz-sawed at my padding for another minute and then just stopped, her body going slack. I let go of the rod and squirmed out from under the big cat. I was sure I’d be sore tomorrow, but for now the adrenaline had me feeling no pain.

Tura whooped and ran down into the ravine to help me to my feet.

“That was stellar!” She slapped me on my back. “I just have to get the antenna software configured and run the OS installation and probably download some patches for her species and—uh oh.”

She was looking down at me, wincing. I followed her gaze. The canvas on my right forearm was stained with blood around a puncture hole.

I’d been bitten.

I was all kinds of dead meat.

I started getting the chills as Tura helped me back to the truck. I knew from watching other people turn what would come next: terrible fever and thirst, convulsions, and then, finally, my eyes would go white and I’d pass into ravenous undeath.

“You should just kill me,” I told her through chattering teeth.

She shook her head and began to cut the canvas, tape and sweat-soaked leather off me with a box knife. “I need your help. Let’s see if you can ride this out tonight.”

“Ride it out?” I stared at her. “Nobody ever rides this out!”

“It’s a disease. Someone has to get better from it. Who’s to say that won’t be you?”

She got out our medical kit and started disinfecting my bite wound with alcohol and peroxide, as if those would make a difference.

“I’m toast,” I whispered.

“Don’t say that!” Tura glared at me as she slathered my wound with antibiotic cream and slapped on a bandage. “You find a way to live, Johnnie! Find a reason to live and hang on.”

Looking into her fierce blue eyes, I didn’t have to search very hard for my reason.

Tura pitched a tent, had me lie down inside in the shade and bound my hands and feet with nylon rope. I was too wrecked to argue.

“I’ll check on you when I’m done with the tiger,” she said. “Hang in there, okay?”

“Yes ma’am.”

I closed my eyes and tried to find my inner calm. This was like any other fight. I had to get my immune system back in the game. Mind over matter, right?

But while I was meditating, sleep took hold of me, and my mind plunged down into the worst nightmares I’ve ever had. I was back in the ring, the canvas sticky with blood and scattered with bashed-out teeth and gobbets of flesh. There was a crowd watching me out there in the darkness beyond the spotlit ring, and from the growls and slobbering the spectators weren’t people. I was naked, flat on my back, feeling more exposed than I had my entire life.

A zombie referee with a worm-eaten face stepped out from the shadowed corner and stood over me, bellowing a ten-count. I scrambled away from him, grabbed the ropes and hauled myself to my feet on shaky legs. The crowd roared, gutterally chanting the name of something no human could hope to pronounce.

“Fight!” the zombie referee shouted, pointing toward the center of the ring.

I turned and got my first good look at my opponent, and the sight of it made me feel as if my brain might melt. It was an utter abomination: a mutant head of tentacles and rasping hagfish mouths and bloody reptillian eyes all jumbled together in no natural pattern, a body sprouting horrible clawed arms. Only its legs looked vaguely human. And as I stared at it, it was getting bigger with every breath.

No way I wanted to go to the mat with that thing. How could I fight it? I needed a chainsaw or a flamethrower, and I didn’t even have a pair of gloves.

“Fight!” roared the referee.

“Fight!” growled the crowd.

So I fought. I punched and I wrestled and I kicked and I bit. I went to the mat, I went to the ropes. Somehow, just as it was about to pin me or lay me out I managed to get free, and we’d start all over again. It just kept getting bigger and uglier and the crowd got louder, but I knew that if I quit I was dead, so I just kept swinging ....

I came out of the dream fighting the ropes binding my hands. There was something hard and cylindrical in my mouth, and my tongue was gummily stuck to it. Tura was kneeling beside me in the tent, looking down at me, clearly worried.

She reached down to pull the object out of my mouth, and I saw it was another metal rod like the one I’d shoved inside the tiger.

“You better not install Linux on me!” I yelled. “I’m strictly a Windows girl!”

Tura smiled like the light streaming in through the tent flap. “Thank God. You’re okay.”

“Okay” was kind of a relative thing. I’d been out of my mind with the fever for two days. I’d lost a bunch of weight and nearly died from dehydration; Tura had tried to get water into me but I kept spitting it out. Guess my brain thought it was fluid from the abomination I was fighting in the nightmare.

I sucked down five warm Gatorades as Tura filled me in on the rest. She told me she’d been tempted to put me out of my misery. But when my eyes stayed clear the first night, she stuck the extra rod in my mouth so that I wouldn’t bite off my own tongue.

I did my best to get strong over the next three days, mostly resting and eating and doing some strength exercises and yoga when I could. At the end of it I could do a decent 50-yard sprint, climb a wall, and lift fifty pounds over my head. All without keeling over or barfing afterward. That’s pretty much minimum fitness for the zombie apocalypse.

While I recovered, Tura spent time fine-tuning Fluffy’s controls. She’d gotten the tiger working by the time I’d come out of the fever, but its movement was slow, robotic, jerky. By the time I was ready to hit the road, though, she had the tiger loping smoothly up and down the road, attacking tree trunks with great ferocity, and leaping back and forth over our truck.

It looked like we were as ready as we were going to be.

Three days later, we were on a bluff overlooking a big, square concrete building that sat in the middle of a barren plateau. Tura peered at it intently through a pair of binoculars. I could see hundreds of tiny figures milling around the building on all sides. Zombies.

“Yep. They’re good and surrounded,” she said.

“Why’s his lab all the way out here?” I asked.

“It’s a counter-terrorism facility. They come up with antidotes and vaccines for bioweapons. The bad guys cook it up, they break it down. They’re handling some really hot stuff here, so they couldn’t have the lab smack in a populated area. So, everybody’s got a kind of rough commute.”

Tura drove the truck down the butte onto the plateau. She took a moment to text Mickey, and then we got the tiger and our weapons out of the back. I had a 12-gauge loaded with buckshot and a .38 semiautomatic pistol. Tura had an AK-47 and twin .22 Colt revolvers. She set the tiger padding along by the truck and then we casually rolled toward the zombie horde.