The Apocalypse Crusade 2 (21 page)

“No,” Deckard said. “This is one place we don’t want to be.”

The dirt road could be seen cutting along the edge of the forest for a few miles. Deckard guessed there were a couple of thousand zombies on the road strung out in long lines—there was no getting through them. With the virility of the disease, he didn’t dare try plowing over or through them.

“Everyone, check to see if there’s a map,” he ordered.

No map.

“Maybe we should consider the Hudson River,” Thuy suggested. “I’m sure we can pick up a boat somewhere around…”

Burke interrupted: “Then y’all can count me out. In fact, lemme have the gun. I’ll take my chances crossin’ here.”

“Are you insane?” Stephanie asked. “Immune or not, you’ll get eaten alive.”

“I’ll take my chances,” he repeated. When she opened her mouth again he stopped her with a raised finger. “Look. I only come this way on account of my little girl come this way. That amba-lance headed east; prolly goin’ to Hartford. So that’s the way I’m goin’.”

“You may take your leave of us, Mr. Burke, but you will do so empty-handed,” Thuy stated. “I’m sorry.”

Burke made a noise like he was spitting out a gnat that had landed on his tongue. “You don’t sound all that sorry. You sound to me like a…”

Deckard swiveled his head around and glared. “I’d be careful if I was you. Now are you getting out or not?”

Without a weapon, Burke had no choice but to stay. Deckard turned the Humvee around and drove back into the slowly settling dust they had just kicked up. They went north for six miles, looking for a way east, but their path was blocked at every turn by the undead. With no choice, they next sped west into the very heart of the quarantined zone.

“I want a big one,” Jaimee Lynn whispered. She was in the basement of an abandoned factory listening to the helicopters whoop-whoop-whoop overhead. They had been constant for the last hour, but what had been constant all day was the growl of her stomach. She had fed five times and yet she was still so hungry. The problem was she could only catch the small and skinny ones.

They were there in the basement with her, staring blankly at the wall. She lined them up, biggest to smallest. They would move only when they heard voices or smelled the clean blood. Or when she told them to. That was key. Even though they were so stupid, they listened to her. She hadn’t known what to do with the first one, Misty and at first had considered burying her since she was technically dead and wasn’t that what you did with dead people? Jaimee Lynn had a vague recollection of her mother being put in the ground, but that felt like ages ago back before her hunger was all-consuming.

She had not known what to do with the nasty, little zombies she had made—strangely, she didn’t consider herself one of
them,
because she could think, to a degree and plan—and now she had an idea. She would use them to get a big one. Maybe a teenager or a small woman. There had been a woman who had come by screeching for someone named Jane. Jaimee Lynn had wondered if one of her little zombie pets was Jane, but none of the kid zombies blinked at the name, they had only scrambled at the wall trying to get at the woman, their mouths opening and closing, letting out a God-awful stink.

Misty said: “Misty hun-gee.”

Jaimee Lynn didn’t notice that Misty had actually used a two-word sentence. She was hungry as well and all she wanted to do was climb the wall and get at the blood, but she knew better. Big people were strong and could hurt you…unless you had a pack of children to sic on them like a bunch of rabid dogs.

“If I use them I can get the woman. I can eat her,” she whispered.

Saying those words didn’t bother her in any way. It was like back when she had been with her dad and she would say: “Daidy, can I have some mac-un-cheese?” To her it was all the same. Mac-un-cheese and the hot, coppery blood of a woman were equal. She was a growing child and she needed food, badly. It was all she could think about, unless she forced herself to concentrate extra hard, then she could hear ideas sprout up inside her noggin. They weren’t genius ideas, not by a long shot.

She planned on going up to street level and lying in wait for the first person to come by. Like a sheepdog, she herded the other little kid zombies up the stairs and out onto the street. They blinked unhappily at the tired grey light filtering down through the clouds. The newest one tried to wander back into the dark of the basement, but Jaimee grabbed her.

“No you don’t. You wait right here,” she said, shoving the little girl down by a trash can. She wasn’t very well hidden, but Jaimee Lynn was already stationing the next child behind a rusted out Volvo.

She started to walk away, but the girl grabbed her and asked: “Eat?”

“Hold on!” Jaimee Lynn scolded. “Stay put and be quiet until one comes by.” She assumed they would all know what to do when “one” came by. When the little zombies were in place, Jaimee Lynn looked around for her own hiding spot. She couldn’t think of anything better than to than to scrunch down next to Misty in the doorway of the factory.

Jaimee Lynn had no clue how to tell time anymore and generally it was a useless concept. Time consisted of the chunks of her life between feedings. This seemed like an exceptionally long chunk. It took so long for someone to come by that it felt like they were playing hide-n-go seek with no one doing the seeking.

After an agonizingly long time, Jaimee Lynn stood up to make sure the other girls hadn’t moved and that was when she saw the car. It was blurry and tiny, far down the street, but as she blinked, it seemed to be getting bigger. She was struck by dual considerations: first her hunger was maddening and she wanted to leap on the car and scratch her way through the windshield to get at whoever was driving, but on the other hand, what if it was a man like the one who had hurt her that morning. He was dim in her mind, but she remembered the pain and the strength of his arms.

The idea of a bigger, stronger creature made her plans for her and she turned to scamper back, however the building had been layered with so much graffiti that everything blended together in crazy colors and illegible swirls. The doors were there, somewhere, camouflaged among all of it. “Misty?” she called out, feeling a touch of fear. It was the fear a child has of being abandoned. It was primal and encoded to such an extent into her brain that even with the disease turning her into a literal monster, the fear of being left behind was still there.

“Yes?” Misty answered. The way she said the word she acted as if she was answering God.

Jaimee Lynn oriented on the word and suddenly the doors came into focus; she hurried to where Misty was squatting, looking dull eyed. “It’s a car,” Jaimee Lynn explained. Misty answered that by licking her lips.

The car stopped by the doors with its engine rumbling, matching the noise of Jaimee Lynn’s stomach. The smell of the human was intoxicating and maddening; it was almost enough to pull her from her hiding place early. By the smell, Jaimee Lynn knew it was a woman in the car and one still in her child-bearing years. She had put on lotion not long before, cocoa butter, and in her hair was a chemical product that had no name in Jaimee Lynn’s mind. She had eaten recently: eggs and toast and there was an old gum smell to her that suggested she had stepped in some and that it had hardened on her shoe.

All of these human aromas sought out that part of her brain that demanded food…no, not food…it was blood. She needed the blood and the need drove her out into the open.

The woman’s eyes bugged at the sudden appearance of the little girl in the dirty hospital gown, with her feet bare and her eyes wickedly black. “I…I am uh, looking for my daughter,” the lady said, speaking across the passenger seat and through the open window. “Her name’s Jane and…and are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” Jaimee Lynn answered. She stood in the doorway, clutching the metal frame with both hands, hoping to hold herself back. It was too soon. The woman was still in her car. She could get away and Jaimee Lynn’s hunger was such a hot pulse in her that she
had
to have blood very soon or she would go crazy.

“Your eyes,” the woman said, pointing. “What’s with your eyes?”

“Dirty,” Jaimee Lynn said. “Jane is here. Jane is in here with us.” The little girl pointed at the door that led into the factory. “Come see her.”

“Jane’s in there?” the woman asked, cautiously. “Jane McPherson? She’s six years-old and about four feet tall? A little black girl?”

Was one of the little kid zombies black? It strained Jaimee Lynn’s power of recollection to come up with an answer: yes. Maybe even two of them were, but she saw race now even less than she had when she had lived with her daddy. “Yes, we have a black one. Come on in here. Come and see the girl. Don’t be afraid.” Jaimee Lynn could smell the fear. It was tinged by a revulsion the woman had for her, but there was still fear. It was intoxicating, too much so for the others.

The little kid zombies hopped up out of their hiding spots and charged the car. The woman jerked in surprise and shock; her eyes bugging even larger than before. The other kids weren’t nearly as pretty as Jaimee Lynn. They were ugly with their throats torn open, and their faces bitten and their black blood clotted like mud. They rushed the driver’s side and tried to climb in through the window. They were stupid and dumb and Jaimee Lynn was furious that they hadn’t been able to listen to her, and that they had ruined the plan.

And yet, Jaimee Lynn rushed the car, as well. She was afraid the others would get all the blood and leave her with nothing but a few drops. With Misty right behind her, she ran at the car and dove through the open passenger window, just as the woman hit the gas. The car leapt forward and there was a cruel thump as one of the little kid zombies was run over, and the woman cried out in both fear and pain as another of the pack had its teeth in her wrist.

Jaimee Lynn knew none of this. Her stunted ability to think was gone. Instinct and hunger powered her as she flashed in at the exposed neck. The woman was turned away fretting over her wrist and the beast that clung to it and her neck, from shoulder to ear, was left wide open, its soft brown skin with its icing of cocoa butter was a magnet for Jaimee Lynn who stretched her mouth hideously wide before lunging down.

The woman screamed and the one hand left the wheel in an awkward attempt to pull Jaimee Lynn from her neck. It proved impossible. The little girl had one hand snagged up in the back of the woman’s hair and the other was clawing back her face, holding the head at an angle. Her feet were planted, one hard on the dash, the other on the passenger seat. She pushed with her skinny legs, basically pinning the woman in place.

Distantly, Jaimee Lynn felt a clot of hair yanked out of her head and nails rake across the back of her neck. There should have been pain, however there was only the ecstasy of hot blood. It filled her mind beyond anything else. Even when the car crashed into a lamppost, so hard that its tail leapt into the air, Jaimee Lynn could only think about the blood.

In seconds, she had to compete as the others in the pack ran to catch up and scrambled around inside the car to get at the meat. Misty snaked under Jaimee Lynn to get at one of the thick thighs, while, on the other side of her, three of the pack were tearing into the woman’s arm, breast and leg. From a high vantage they looked like piglets in a row, suckling.

The woman fought and hollered in a hoarse voice until Jaimee Lynn finally got to the plump artery that ran right up next to the trachea. With every bite, she had come closer and closer to the maddening thump-thump-thump- of the artery and when she did…ahhh, nirvana. Her teeth ceased their ripping and tearing because the blood just came gushing up. She let it flow into her mouth and then when her belly sagged from the meat and the blood, she let it flow across her lips and tongue.

Her need left her with every passing second and she began to feel sleepy. Had she been alone she would have slept, curled up in the corpse, but Misty was far from satisfied and her need had been just as great. When Jaimee Lynn stopped fighting, Misty, with surprising strength, pulled her away and went at the neck. On the other side of the woman another of the pack did the same thing and together, the pair chewed until they were into the trachea and the last of the woman’s breath whispered in their ears.

The rest of the pack mutilated the corpse trying to get at the cooling blood and when they had their fill, they slunk back down into the dark beneath the factory.

The crashed car and the corpse sat on the quiet street, and during the last few hours of daylight, a number of people looked in at the wreck and saw the corpse lying still and grim. A few of them took the time to call the police, most didn’t bother. The police had lit their cars and warbled the air with their sirens as they cut westward. Every last one of them. The people were left to police themselves.

Connecticut’s small force of National Guard, being thrown into the twenty-mile breach as quickly as they arrived, could not hope to take on the thousands of zombies streaming across the border and so the Governor, displaying a keen awareness of the situation, had declared martial law and had drafted into the National Guard every last law enforcement officer in the state.

No one knew if it was legal but no one was challenging the notion either.

So the body of the unknown woman lay there for over a day as the Com-cells multiplied and, according to her specific DNA blueprint, healed her enough for her to crack her eyes. Another half-day went by before she could move. Gradually, she sat up, and about the time the coroner in Hartford opened up a cold storage locker and pulled out the body of Carl McMillan, the man whom Jaimee Lynn had infected, the woman was strong enough and hungry enough to begin feeding.