This Plague of Days, Season Two (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) (15 page)

Their sneakers squeaked on the tile floor as they stopped short at the top floor’s exit. The key card Jack had stolen from Dr. Merritt beeped twice but did not pop the door’s electronic lock.

“We have to go back,” Jack said.

“Through checkpoints and toward the camp? I don’t think so.” Anna ran back down the corridor and returned with a red fire extinguisher. She used it as a sledge hammer on the door’s knob. It came away in three swings, but the door was still locked.

When she tried hammering the door, they heard footsteps on the metal stairs beyond the exit. Soon, two soldiers wearing n95 masks burst through. “What are you doing?”

Jack stepped in front of her daughter. “Dr. Merritt is injured badly!”

“You can save him, if you hurry!” Anna said. “He’s bleeding from the neck! He got thrown through a glass wall by that…” By what? Words escaped her. The patient had been a sailor in the Royal Navy. The man’s name had been Wiggins.
 

“The infection has changed,” Theo said. “Wiggins is something else now.”

Jaimie had been told he was different all his life. He felt sorry for Mr. Wiggins.

One soldier turned to the other. “I’ll go check out the doctor and call for a medic. You stay on this door and send this bunch back out to the civvie pit. No one leaves the yard. We keep containment and control.”

The soldier stiffened. He was broad across the shoulders and tight through the abdomen, his body a
V
. “Containment and control, sir!” the soldier echoed with a dead stare.

“See that?” Theo said. “There are all kinds of zombies.”

The first soldier gave a curt nod to the guard and raced toward Merritt’s office.

“You heard the man, folks.” The soldier had no rifle, but he put a hand on his holster. “Go back the way you came and proceed to Checkpoint Charlie.”

Jaimie was astonished and fascinated. The man expected compliance based on the costume he wore. His voice had no authority and he hadn’t unholstered his weapon.
 

If he had pulled his weapon, he might have had a chance to shoot Anna before she sprayed the fire extinguisher in his eyes, driving him back. If not for his arrogance and sense of entitlement, his sister would have failed to get them through the exit door. Instead, she struck the soldier in the crotch once and drove him to his knees with two more hard swings to his skull. He dropped to the floor beside the broken doorknob.

“Lots of pushups, but not one exercise to strengthen your face,” Anna said.

“Or testicles,” Theo added.

The Spencers escaped down the stairwell, turned left, and made their way toward the parking lot. They would have been stopped by dozens of other soldiers, but the screams from the camp swallowed the sirens. The soldiers were too busy to stop one family. The riot was already out of control.

Sporadic gunfire cracked the night. Soldiers ran toward the gunfire.

“What’s happening? We shouldn’t have — ” Before Anna could finish her thought, machine guns opened up, echoing up and down the Speedway’s walls. Then more guns fired and the screams of the refugees rose to an aria of terror.

Two explosions boomed and rattled through the building they’d just escaped.

A fresh spike of screams followed the explosions’ thunder, but the answering howls of rage from the newly infected climbed higher than fear could reach.

* * *
 

“Keep moving, son!” Theo said. “The riot’s in full swing!”

Pandemonium let loose on a bat’s wing
, Jaimie thought, reaching for a comforting rhyme. Words with many vowels usually brought him peace.

The word ‘pandemonium’ failed to calm him, however. ‘Pandemonium’ tasted like bile and the word ‘demon’ squatted and burned through its middle. The rising point of the letter
d
felt like the tip of a blade, less than an inch from his eyes.

“They’ll stampede the exits!” Jack puffed, almost out of breath. “When the sun comes up, there will be mounds of bodies at the gates. Everyone will try to get out at once. Between the guns and the trampled…what have we done? What have we done?”

Jaimie watched his mother’s anguish grow.
 

“It’s not your fault, Jaimie,” his father told him. “Merritt didn’t know what he was dealing with. What happened would have happened one way or another. You know what Wiggins is doing now.”

Jaimie did know and he wasn’t sure that he had not done wrong. He’d seen the perfection of Wiggins’ purpose. If everyone was as single-minded as the prisoner he’d freed, everyone could have everything they wanted.

* * *
 

The predator, like a wolf in a chicken coop, ran and dodged amongst the tents and milling crowds, biting and clawing the refugees. The sounds rising behind him were not merely those of the terrified and the wounded and the dying.

More than fear rose from the camp. Wiggins was a whirling, rogue lion on a rampage. The numbers of those boiling over with perfect, crimson hunger grew.
 

Each person Wiggins infected — every man, woman and child — turned into another predator within one minute. The infection spread like a cyclone, building strength as it swirled through the camp, doubling each minute. With each attack, Wiggins added to his forces.

As mothers rushed to their children, their children turned and snapped their milk teeth, tasting blood for the first time. The mothers turned on their husbands and sisters and brothers. The storm front of the virus grew stronger, claiming more and more in its wake. As good Samaritans swooped in to bandage the wounds of the fallen, packs became tribes and tribes of predators — primal, fast, sentient, and starving — transformed into an army of things so pure, they became a force of nature.
 

Men with guns cannot fight the wind.

* * *

Jaimie’s eyes shifted to Theo. His father beckoned him to follow through the dark shapes of cars and trucks. He wished he could understand his father’s contradictions. Theo, the atheist who talked of a Gateway to the Spirit World. The man who confessed to killing a friend as a child and looked to his mute son for forgiveness when he found no sign of mercy in the stars. Theo said he didn’t believe in God. He believed in nature and the vague demands of poetic justice.

Jaimie did not understand what his father meant by poetic justice. The closest he could come was an obsession with symmetry. Perhaps he’d have to read more poetry before he could understand.

In the symphony of anger, hunger and anguish rising behind him in a tower of pain, Jaimie heard it:
Vox populi vox Dei.
The voice of the people is the voice of God.
The Latin expression was a simple political sentiment, but Jaimie had a new interpretation now.
Amid merciless screams, God is Rage.

Jaimie ran to the van and lay in his seat with his head in his father’s lap. The boy pressed his palms against his ears hard. The pressure caused pain, but he needed silence before he could find solace. He squeezed his eyes shut and waited for fear and exhaustion to blur into sleep. The lieutenant from Kansas City was chasing them and now Wiggins and his starving army would chase them, too.

Starving for protein
, Anna had said. His family was made of protein.

If the screams were the voice of God, then the infected were His instruments, a host of angels. People misunderstood or had forgotten what angels were for.
Host
meant
army
. People spoke of kind and generous guardian angels, but tonight, white-eyed warriors born in blood emerged into a new world of pain. These angels came to conquer.

Mrs. Bendham sat in the back of the van, screaming questions but the Spencers ignored her.
 

Jaimie wanted to tell his mother to push the accelerator harder, but she was doing the best she could, weaving her way among abandoned cars.
 

Sleep was where the boy had to retreat, but even sleep wasn’t the escape it had once been. Jaimie saw things in dreams he could not look away from.

In the Bible, his mother had taught him that Cain was exiled to the Land of Nod after slaying his brother Abel. Just as they had forgotten the nature of angels, people equated the Land of Nod with sleep.

Since the fall of mankind, Jaimie could feel new forces rising, even in his deepest sleep. The old meanings of host and angel and Nod were making their way back into this new world. An ancient magic, rumoured only in legends and campfire stories, was seeping back, returning and growing stronger with each blood sacrifice.

The boy had not dreamed before the plague, but now, sometimes, he glimpsed people on a journey to meet him: A man in a white shirt; a man in a dark uniform; a black woman; and a thin, brown man. The two little girls with them brought Hope and Long Life.

He worried about the children. Monsters chased them, too.

T
ODAY
’
S
SOLUTIONS
ARE
TOMORROW
’
S
TANGLES

C
old wind pushed and pulled Lijon as she limped to the rail. She searched the gray skies over Reykjavik harbor. Lijon startled when Shiva, wrapped in a heavy coat, appeared at her elbow.

Shiva gave her subordinate a broad, ruby-lipped smile. “Is the pain bad today?”

Lijon pulled her long hair back from her face, smiled coyly and shook her head. “I try to walk normally so no one sees — ”

“But you thought you were alone. You thought there was no one to see.”

Lijon took a moment to answer. “If I don’t try to walk normally, it hurts my leg. If I walk with a limp too long, the pain moves up my back.”

“And the tyrosine kinase inhibitor you take? You have a good supply stockpiled?”

“When those medications are gone, I’ll switch to painkillers.”

“Desmoid tumors are so rare. I’m sorry we can’t guarantee a steady supply of the best drugs for your condition.”

“I’m only one person, Dear Sister. I’m sure among the survivors there are many diabetics passing away because of degraded insulin.” The sun broke through the cloud cover briefly and Lijon looked up, her fingers drumming the rail.

“An admirable attitude. But, I wonder…you say you are willing to sacrifice, but still you search the sky. Modern missiles make no sound before they strike. A
missile with active radar and internal guidance systems sniffs out its target by a combination of calculating heading and the size and shape of the ship. It doesn’t matter how the ship is painted.”

“I know, but I wonder if we’d given Captain Price an alternative route — ”
 

“If the ship travels outside standard shipping lanes trying to hide, it would only be easier to detect.”

“Surely — ”

“Sister, we’ve considered all the options. That’s another reason we’ll win. Our enemies can only react in the moment. We act from years of planning.”

“Of course,” Lijon said. Still, she clung to the rail and watched sheets of altocumulus clouds shift to dim the sun again.

“Internal guidance does not rely on external information so their missiles are immune to jamming and deception. The enemy programs the missile’s computer based on the ship’s course and speed before launch. Its onboard instruments can approximate the ships predicted location with accelerometers and gyros. There was no other way.”

“I know you’re right, Dear Sister. After years of telling our families we were going to the movies, going on dates, at school…living double lives…” Lijon shrugged helplessly.

Shiva put an arm around her and squeezed. “I know. It’s hard to believe the revolution is finally here. Tell me, Lijon. What will you miss?”

Lijon looked away, unsure if this was a test, a trap or an honest question. She answered honestly, “Vanilla bean lattes. Awfully bourgeois and shallow of me, isn’t it? My coffee wasn’t always fair trade, but to fit in and keep my cover — ”

Shiva let go of Lijon and rolled her eyes. “You are not going to tell me that drinking vanilla bean lattes was part of your cover. You aren’t seriously telling me that!”

“No, Dear Sister. It was more…like a last chance treat before going on a diet that will never end.”

“Focus on the future, Sister. Remember why?”

“Because we’re building it.”

“And making history.”

“And making history.”

From the rail of the
Mars
, the luxury cruise ship, Lijon and Shiva had an excellent view of the
Gaian Commander
as it pulled away from Reykjavik harbor at full speed.
 

Flash.

The missile hit the
Gaian Commander
at the water line amidships. The container ship was far enough offshore that there was a brief pause as the sound of the explosion raced to catch up with the white light.

Icelanders ran to the shore, pointing and shouting. Some leaped into small fishing boats to motor out to the wreck, but her back was broken and the destruction throughout the hull was so complete, the ocean swallowed the container ship before any survivors among the skeleton crew could man the lifeboats.

“Exocet, do you think?” Shiva mused.

“I don’t know much about missiles,” Lijon said, her eyes fixed on the sea. “I’m merely your deck officer, Dear Sister. Shipping and unshipping. Dunnage and stowage.”

“You know you’re more than that. Did you experience any difficulties moving our guests from the
Gaian Commander
to the
Mars
?”

It was Stanhope who gave the guards the most trouble. When they unlocked the cabin door, the former oil exec was picking at the meat between the toes of a foot still wrapped in the knit of a blood-drenched baby booty. He was feverish and dangerous — especially to anyone not inoculated against the virus he carried — but his athleticism was still that of an over-privileged middle-aged man who sat behind a desk most of the time.

Lijon had supervised his capture personally. It was she who thought to use loops on the ends of poles to slip around the necks of the infected.